Malin Ah-King and Eva Hayward, Aliens in Green, Adham Faramawy, Feminist Technoscience Governance Collaboratory, Annabel Guérédrat, Rian Ciela Hammond and Krystal Tsosie, Franziska Klaas and Susanne Bauer, Marne Lucas, Mary Maggic, OBOT, Byron Rich, Mariana Rios Sandoval and the Rosæ Canine Collective, Lenka Veselá, Ker Wallwork
Preface & Acknowledgments
Introduction
Malin Ah-King and Eva Hayward Toxic Sexes: Perverting Pollution and Queering Hormone Disruption
Rian Ciela Hammond and Krystal Tsosie Refusal and Autonomy within Colonially Mediated Molecular Relations: Root Picker in Conversation with Geneticist and Bioethicist Krystal Tsosie
Mariana Rios Sandoval and the Rosæ Canine Collective (Bethsabée Elharar-Lemberg, Maïwenn Le Roux, and Elena Souvannavong) Post-Industrial Self-Gynecology Plant Manual
Annabel Guérédrat Sargassumate Me: The Body of a Contaminated Caribbean Witch Decolonizes Herself
HRT {(^)} IRT: Hormone Replacement Therapy Reimagined via Infrared Thermography OBOT (Maddalena Fragnito and Zoe Romano) Letter No. 4: On the Fall of Joy
Mary Maggic
To Stand in the Fire and Fear
Aliens in Green with the participation of Léonore Bonaccini, Ewen Chardronnet, Xavier Fourt, Špela
Petrič, and Mary Maggic
Becoming Non-Alien: Provisional Manifesto for a Laboratory of Recombinant Commons
Byron Rich
Epicurean Endocrinology: The MiddleAmerican Grocery Store Index
Franziska Klaas and Susanne Bauer
Endocrine Disrupting Substances: A Partial Inventory
Glossary of Terms
Unconclusion
Preface & Acknowledgments
The book you are holding in your hands tells different stories about entanglements with hormones and hormone-mimicking chemicals. It is a collection of essays, poetic interventions, and critical provocations brought to you by a group of artists, activists, and feminist techno-science scholars and practitioners united by a shared belief that we are not autonomous, self-contained, and self-governing individuals but porous and malleable, open to change and reconfiguration. A critical examination of the effects of industrial, pharmaceutical, and more-than-human production of hormonally active molecules shifts our attention to our non-innocent chemical relations and at times traumatic and harmful, even deadly, entanglements with them. Studying these effects necessitates our engagement with issues of consent, complicity, and violence attached to the consumerism and extractivism implicit in the production, use, and disposal of hormonally active substances. There is no way out: the ubiquity of anthropogenic chemicals — be them pharmaceutical hormones or industrially manufactured substances with endocrine disrupting properties — leaves us with no option but to live our lives with and against them. This book seeks to facilitate this process of learning to live well in a world that also includes these chemicals.
Like our bodies, books are entities that exist owing to multiple influences, processes, and agencies. Including acknowledgments in books is an important reminder that it is because of a multitude of actors (rather than just listed “authors”) that books come into existence. With over thirty people authoring this collective monograph, acknowledging and expressing gratitude to all those who have supported us as we kept working towards the completion of this book becomes a challenging task. Responding to this challenge, this acknowledgement breaks with the tradition of writing an exhaustive list of all our partners, lovers, parents, children, friends, colleagues, supervisors, teachers, students, academic departments, institutions, and funding bodies (as important and indispensable as their support is for us and our book) and instead acknowledges the contribution of a particular entity without which this book quite literally would not be possible: the paper it is printed on.
You wouldn’t be able to hold our book in your hands if it wasn’t for this 100 percent post-consumer recycled paper. The decision to use paper made of waste collected from recycling programs stems from our commitment to take
1 See, for example, Ulf Granhall, Allana Welsh, Ingela Noredal Throbäck, Karin Hjort, Mikael Hansson, and Sara Hallin, “Bacterial Community Diversity in Paper Mills Processing Recycled Paper,” Journal of Industrial Microbiology and Biotechnology 37.10 (October 2010): 1061–69,
our material relations seriously. Using recycled paper, rather than paper made of virgin fibers, reduces greenhouse gas emissions and protects natural resources saving not only trees but also energy and water needed for manufacturing. However, the commitment to use recycled paper comes with several challenges economic, practical, and aesthetic and entangles us, producers of this book, and you, dear reader, in a set of relations worthy of attention. Despite being produced from waste, recycled paper is more expensive than new paper from virgin fibers. This is because of the extra steps needed to create recycled material compared to manufacturing a new product. Additional processes include paper collection and recovery, sorting, removal of adhesives, staples, and other things that may be attached to the paper, pulping, and de-inking. Another consideration of concern is that paper fibers degrade when they are recycled, losing their strength and length. As a result, paper created from reused fibers is less durable and weaker. In addition, it is not as soft as paper from virgin fibers, with lower absorbency rates and worse color retention. Since the characteristics of recycled paper depend on the properties of the waste paper used for its production, recycled papers differ greatly not only by type, but even from batch to batch, presenting the design process with multiple challenges. Because of the varying paper qualities and white tones, no standard exists for recycled paper and color-binding proofs are therefore not possible. Moreover, some studies suggest that recycled paper might be less hygienic compared to paper from virgin fibers.1 This is owing to the starches used as binding ingredients, which may serve as a breeding ground for bacteria and germs. Last, but not least and of particular significance to this book recycled paper contains increased amounts of endocrine disrupting chemicals. Although recycled paper requires less bleach and other potentially harmful chemicals than virgin fiber paper, it can contain ink residue and other contaminants. Ink, adhesives, and other substances, such as those used for surface treatment of paper and board packaging, are detached from the fibers’ surface during the repulping process. Studies indicate that small amounts of chemicals of concern, including endocrine disrupting chemicals, such as polyfluorinated compounds, bisphenols, or phthalates, can still be detected in paper made from recycled materials.2 From the perspective of environmental health, the recycling of paper is desirable; however, recycled paper containing potentially harmful chemicals may pose a health hazard to humans.
The decision to print on a more expensive, yet weaker, less reliable, and potentially toxic recycled paper is a commitment that is not separate from, but instead bound within this book and the ideas explored in it a material choice to acknowledge dependencies, vulnerabilities, and sensitivities of contemporary life extending beyond our individual selves. Inspired by multispecies feminist theorist Donna Haraway’s proposal for more-than-human sympoietic action nurturing common well-being and survival on a damaged planet, our making-with recycled paper marks the commitment of this book to “stay with the trouble” by affirming and embracing impure, inconsistent, weak, and damaged forms of being in/with the Anthropocene.3
2 See, for example, Anne Marie Vinggaard and Anna Kjerstine Rosenmai, “Paper and Board Food Packaging Contains Endocrine Active Chemicals,” DTU (18 March 2015), food.dtu.dk/english /News/2015/03/Paper -and-board-food-packag ing-contains-endocrine -active-chemicals; Greta Stieger, “Toxic Chemicals in Recycled Paper and Board: Danish Researchers Detect Chemicals of Concern in Food Packaging Made from Recycled Paper and Board; Push for EUWide Regulation of Paper and Board Food Contact Materials,” Food Packaging Forum (26 October 2015), foodpackagingforum.org /news/toxic-chemicals -in-recycled-paper-and -board; and, David Pérez-Palacios, Miguel Ángel Fernández-Recio, Cristina Moreta, and María Teresa Tena, “Determination of Bisphenol-Type Endocrine Disrupting Compounds in Food-Contact Recycled-Paper Materials by Focused Ultrasonic Solid-Liquid Extraction and Ultra Performance Liquid Chromatography-High Resolution Mass Spectrometry,” Talanta 99 (September 2012): 167–74.
3
Donna J. Haraway, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2016).
Introduction
The word “synthetic” comes from the ancient Greek
[synthetikós] — meaning relating to or involving synthesis. Synthesis is a composed word, combining syn-, meaning “together with,” “along with,” or “jointly,” and -tithenai, meaning “to put,” “to place.” In accord with this original meaning, synthetic things are things composed of multiple parts, combining these parts to form a new, connected whole. Synthetic things involve composing, combining, joining, and togetherness.
The guiding idea of this book is that we are synthetic. We contend that nothing in this world is a standalone thing. We are composite entities, mixtures in which the stuff of the world comes together to form what we understand to be ourselves.1
The stuff of the world that this book concerns ranges from bodily produced hormones to synthetically manufactured compounds, called endocrine disrupting chemicals, which have the ability to interfere with the biosynthesis, metabolism, and various functions of the former. Hormones examined here are synthesized in and released from endocrine cells of animals (including humans), synthesized within the bodies of plants and fungi (called phytohormones and mycohormones), or in laboratories and at industrial sites. In this regard, the notion of the synthetic points us to more than the compositional nature of things it simultaneously refers to the processes of biochemical and chemical syntheses by which hormones and endocrine disrupting compounds emerge. In chemistry, synthesis has a specific meaning referring to the assembling and production of chemicals. Chemical synthesis is the creation of chemical compounds by reaction from simpler materials a complicated undertaking involving human actors, chemical agents, reactions, catalysts, protocols, and methods by which new, more complex molecules are constructed.2 In that sense, we understand the synthetic as a concept that cuts across scales as it ties together the molecular with bodies and body politics, global economies, and environmental concerns. Our claim that we are synthetic also acknowledges the ever-increasing amounts of synthetically manufactured molecules entering and co-constituting our bodies, lives, and environments.
Synthetic Becoming investigates combined and interactive effects of industrially synthesized endocrine disrupting chemicals, pharmaceutical hormones, and hormones biosynthesized in the bodies of human and nonhuman organisms. Effects of hormonally active molecules produced across all these sites are bound with conditions and rela-
1 For the notion of “the stuff of the world” informed by material feminisms, see Stacy Alaimo, Exposed: Environmental Politics and Pleasures in Posthuman Times (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016).
2 See the definition of chemical synthesis by Oxford University researchers at chem .ox.ac.uk/synthesis.
3 Ernest H. Starling, “The Croonian Lectures. I. On the chemical correlation of the functions of the body,” Lancet 166.4276 (August 1905): 423–25.
tions in which they occur and must be considered not only as part of broader molecular networks but also as part of scientific, social, and cultural practices that involve them. It is through these practices that we understand some hormonal molecules to be either “natural” or “synthetic,” or either “good” hormonal medicines or “bad” endocrine disruptors. Building on the conceptualizations of materialism feminisms, new materialism, and posthumanism, we challenge simplistic binaries pertaining to hormonally active agents and attend to the different and unexpected ways in which their biochemical and sociopolitical effects converge, combine, and collide.
4 Celia Roberts, Messengers of Sex: Hormones, Biomedicine and Feminism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007).
The very way we come to know hormones emerges within a particular situatedness and from certain infrastructures of knowledge. Hormones are not fixed objectifiable entities but carry social and cultural ideas. Hormones are “chemical messengers” that circulate through the bloodstream and inform functions of organs and tissues.3 Hormones have wide-ranging effects on our bodies, including effects on blood sugar, lipid metabolism, bone density, growth and development, fat distribution, cardiovascular function, sleep, mood, cognition, and stress levels. Notwithstanding these effects, it is their transformation of sexual development and reproduction that most occupies scientists’ attention, especially when it comes to endocrine disrupting compounds. Gender studies scholar Celia Roberts coined the term “messengers of sex” to critically analyze how hormones as bio-social agents act to produce sexed bodies and behaviors.4 Drawing on her analysis, we interrogate signals chemical and cultural transmitted and communicated within planetary-wide infrastructures of hormones and hormone-disrupting chemicals. With the focus on involuntary exposure to industrially manufactured endocrine disrupting chemicals (as opposed to exposure to naturally occurring hormones or voluntary experimentation with hormonally active substances of all types), we examine the capacity of these compounds to interfere with not only endocrine systems but also normative gender orders. As evolutionary biologist Malin Ah-King and gender researcher Eva Hayward point out in their essay in this book, “endocrine disruption is a toxic, expressive, and politically problematic form of corporal-environmental interaction that unravels sex determination.” To shed some light on what this unravelling entails is one of the primary goals of our collective investigation.
The figuration of synthetic becoming emphasizes that we are not only synthetic but also constantly being synthesized. It marks the open-endedness of our synthetic nature
the incessant emergence and re-emergence through the processes of synthesis. Synthesis understood as an undertaking whereby simpler elements come together and interact with each other, giving rise to a higher order of emergence, greater than a mere sum of its parts is linked to complexity. With the notion of becoming, we underscore this link between synthesis and complexity, characterizing the action of components interacting in multiple situated ways, yielding nonlinearity, randomness, collective dynamics, and emergence. Following material feminist, new materialist, and posthumanist lines of thought, we understand becoming to be a counter-causal process. Becoming, particularly as discussed by feminist theorist Karen Barad, signifies the mutual co-constitution of entangled material and social phenomena coming into being out of different possibilities occurring at each moment.5 It follows that cause and effect, as well as other distinctions such as “nature” and “culture,” or “natural” and “synthetic,” do not exhibit clear boundaries, but only become determinate and meaningful in the dynamic and open-ended processes of becoming.
Becoming is a particularly helpful concept to grasp the indeterminacy of how substances unfold performatively and relationally beyond the dualisms of “natural” and “synthetic,” “pure” and “polluted,” or “healthy” and “damaged.” In the book, we paint various scenes in which hormonally active substances unfold and emerge relationally and differentially, exploring these hormonal landscapes as sites of indeterminacy and becoming — ditching purity politics for the sake of interrogating the possibilities of resilience, chemical kinships, queer survival, and resurgent life, which asserts and continues nonetheless.6 We embrace impure and contaminated forms of life, affirming their capacity to recompose and become something else, and search for new, unpredictable, and surprising ways of living well with the “bad” kin. We “stay with the trouble,” learning how to make-with the chemicals with the potential for harm and build resilience through encounters with toxicity, contamination, and impurity. Synthetic becoming, we point out, is a symbiosis — living together — a sympoietic becoming.7
To designate hormonal landscapes as sites of indeterminacy and becoming is not to gloss over the ongoing violence connected to profitable chemicals being produced, used, and dumped into the environment, nor is it meant to relativize these effects. Rather, it is an appeal to shift our gaze from the brokenness and suffering of the victims of pollution to the accountability of perpetrators of violence; it is a call to suspend damage-centered research in favor of investigating the interactions, power relations, and modes
5 Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007).
6 On the concept of “chemical kinship,” see Angeliki Balayannis and Emma Garnett, “Chemical Kinship: Interdisciplinary Experiments with Pollution,” Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience, 6.1 (2020): 1–10; on the notion of “alterlife”— a figuration of chemical exposure indexing life in its already altered state, which is also life open to further alterations— see Michelle Murphy, “Alterlife and Decolonial Chemical Relations,” Cultural Anthropology 32.4 (2017): 494–500; and, Michelle Murphy, “Against Population, Towards Alterlife,” in Making Kin Not Population, eds. Adele E. Clarke and Donna J. Haraway (Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press, 2018), 101–23.
7
Donna J. Haraway, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2016).
8 For the notion of “damage-centered research,” see Eve Tuck, “Suspending Damage: A Letter to Communities,” Harvard Educational Review 79.3 (2009): 40928.
9 Reena Shadaan and Michelle Murphy, “Endocrine-Disrupting Chemicals (EDCs) as Industrial and Settler Colonial Structures: Towards a Decolonial Feminist Approach,” Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience 6.1 (Spring 2020): 1–36. See also: Max Liboiron, Pollution is Colonialism (Durham: Duke University Press, 2021).
of governance that structure and sustain chemical violence.8 As environmental justice researchers Reena Shadaan and Michelle Murphy argue, the problematics of industrially manufactured endocrine disruptors extend to the structures of settler colonialism and racial capitalism associated with oil extraction and refining, as well as industrial emissions to air and releases of water pollutants.9 Following their argument that exposure to endocrine disrupting chemicals is materially a form of colonial environmental violence, we seek to contribute to a systemic analysis of the interactions and power relations that structure and sustain this violence in order to dismantle the regimes of extraction and exploitation pertaining not only to endocrine disrupting chemicals, but also to pharmaceutical hormones. In particular, the contributions in this book by artist Annabel Guérédrat, and by artist and biologist Rian Ciela Hammond and Indigenous geneticist and bioethicist Krystal Tsosie, address hormones and hormone-disrupting chemicals through the lens of colonialism, proposing artistic and scientific strategies for decolonizing these uncaring, colonial relations.
With the ubiquity of anthropogenic endocrine disruptors in the environment — and the abundance of prescription and over-the-counter hormonal drugs (as well as those available to buy online) — who are we becoming? How do synthetic hormones and hormone-disrupting compounds affect us and how do we interact with them? How can we live well with endocrine disrupting chemicals despite their potential to cause harm? In what follows, we seek answers to these questions in a collection of critical but hopeful stories about these peculiar agents. These stories can be read in any order. Common threads run through them, and we invite you, dear reader, to explore and link our storylines in any way you choose, navigating the labyrinth of stories according to your own path. We encourage you to examine the connections among stories and to weave them together in different ways to synthesize a complex web of thoughts, ideas, characters, plots, conflicts, mysteries, and revelations.
The synthesis of form and content has been a key principle guiding our thinking about how to articulate our research. Each contribution, written from within a particular situatedness, takes a different form, telling its story using different means. Altogether, the book presents fourteen contributions by a collective of more than thirty artists, activists, and humanities and social sciences researchers combining aesthetic and discursive strategies of storytelling. To facilitate the non-linear experience of traversing the book and interacting with its different styles and approaches to research (and) storytelling, each contribution is preceded by a brief
introduction acquainting the reader with the author(s), key ideas explored in the story, and how it could be read. In addition to the contributions of individually and collaboratively working researchers, a collectively written glossary of terms is included to (p)revisit the pivotal conceptual ideas driving the book. The glossary, we hope, can serve as a baseline for further exploration of thoughts and ideas examined in the book, continuing and expanding our work.
The book is a peer-reviewed collective monograph insisting that our interventions at the intersection of art, activism, and feminist technoscience indeed count as research. Extending the notion of the synthetic to also include epistemic concerns, we make use of the synthetic methodologies, combining different approaches to researching and different ways of articulating research concerns, advocating for their importance for studying the hidden, slow-moving, and emerging realities of our becoming with hormones and endocrine disrupting chemicals. Our experimental engagements look for the different ways of knowing and being with these chemical agents. Ultimately, in this way, the synthetic adheres not only to our research topic but also to ethical and epistemic considerations of our work. Karen Barad’s conception of “ethico-onto-epistem-ology” captures this spirit of our book, in which everything comes together in an entangled way — our research concerns, ethics, and politics, as well as epistemic claims. None of them can be separated from each other.10 They co-emerge and co-exist. As we do, too. Finally, we hope you enjoy the book and its myriad components as we attempt to rethink and reshape the ways by which we are becoming synthetic.
10 Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway.
MALIN AH-KING
an evolutionary biologist and feminist science scholar engaged—from an “insider-outsider” position—in investigating how and why evolutionary biologists produce the knowledge about sex that they do, as well as what knowledge is ignored, delayed, or not produced
● Stockholm, Sweden
EVA HAYWARD
an anti-disciplinary scholar with training in the history of science, film and art history, and psychoanalytic semiotics, attending to the persistence of sexuality and aesthetics in the structuring of knowledge, subjectivity, and power
● Utrecht, Netherlands and New Mexico, USA
TOXIC SEXES
How can we understand the processes of endocrine disruption beyond common normative assumptions of sex and sexuality?
What cultural nerves are triggered by the mutations of sexed biologies associated with artificially produced hormones?
How can we discuss the effects of endocrine disruptors seriously, without retelling heteronormative understandings of sexed biologies?
Engaging in debates about sex changes in animals as a consequence of environmental endocrine pollution, this essay uses a dynamic model of sex to show how hormones and their environmental disruption can be understood as part of an ongoing process of sexing. The deleterious effects of material culture—the objects we encircle ourselves with, the food we eat, the water we drink, the medicines we take, the hygienic products we use—become part of the process of sexing. Side-stepping the now entrenched debates about the socially or biologically constructed nature of sex, sex might be better understood as a dynamic emergence with environment, habitat, and ecosystem, and made toxically so within the context of pollution. Combining feminist and queer studies of sex, gender, and sexuality with a critical but engaged approach to biology, this essay claims toxicity as one of the current conditions of sex in the contemporary moment. The intent is to broaden our understanding of humans’ and animals’ shared vulnerability and explore potential sites for coming to terms with the environmental catastrophe that we are already living in.
Toxic Sexes: Perverting
Pollution and Queering Hormone Disruption
INTRODUCTION
1 Stacy Alaimo, Bodily Natures: Science, Environment, and Material Self (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010).
2 Celia Roberts, Messengers of Sex: Hormones, Biomedicine and Feminism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007).
3 Donna J. Haraway, “Awash in Urine: DES and Premarin® in Multispecies Responseability,” Women’s Studies Quarterly, 40.1/2 (Spring/Summer 2012): 301–16.
4 Bailey Kier, “Interdependent Ecological Transsex: Notes on Re/production, ‘Transgender’ Fish, and the Management of Populations, Species, and Resources,” Women & Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory, 20.3 (2011): 299–319.
5 Malin Ah-King and Sören Nylin, “Sex in an Evolutionary Perspective: Just Another Reaction Norm,” Evolutionary Biology, 37.4 (November 2010): 234–46.
6 Haraway, “Awash in Urine.”
Endocrine disruption, as attended to in this essay, is a toxic, expressive, and politically problematic form of corporalenvironmental interaction that unravels sex determination; “endocrine disruptive compounds” (EDCs) prompt unruly thresholds of sexual emergence and modes of morphological upheaval. “Toxic sex,” this paper’s title, is not a rootbound forecast — disaster does not await us — rather, it is a reminder that we are already living in ruination. Toxic sex foregrounds sex as an ongoing process influenced by endocrine disruptive chemicals, describing our shared vulnerability to one another; our bodies are open to the planet.
Guided by Stacy Alaimo,1 Celia Roberts,2 Donna Haraway,3 Bailey Kier,4 and other feminists focused on environmental issues and multispecies ethics, this essay: 1) traces some popular discourses about the effects of endocrine disruption through the normative assumptions of sex and sexuality; 2) suggests a broadened understanding of pollution-induced sexual change through a dynamic model of “reactive sex;”5 and, 3) proffers an approach toward an ecological resilience that reframes the toxicity without reasserting a politics of purity. What follows is more descriptive than definitive, more entanglement than disentangled resolution. Moreover, while this paper unrests oversimplified assumptions about sex and sexual difference by “staying with the trouble” 6 of pollution, it also demonstrates the overwhelming need for critical apprehension of anthropogenic forces and their viral consequences on planet Earth.
EMERGING PERSPECTIVES
The Scientific Committee on Problems in the Environment (SCOPE) and the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC) have been diligently investigating the impact of endocrine active substances, which are known to alter reproduction and sexual morphology in organisms. The new SCOPE-IUPAC report says that endocrine disruption can be expected in all animals in which hormones initiate physical change, including humans. Although the importance of low-dose exposure to endocrine disruptors for increasing human disease worldwide is contested —
e.g., claims of the connection between endocrine pollution and increased infertility7 — and some researchers even claim that the evidence is scarce, nevertheless, references to the large body of studies on disrupted animals are mounting.8
Among the agents culpable of endocrine disruption in ecosystems are: artificially produced hormones (steroids), which have been widely used as contraceptives for the last fifty years;9 steroids are found in other treatments such as anti-inflammatory hormone cortisol (hydro-cortisone) used as an active ingredient in organ transplant anti-rejection drugs as well as asthma inhalers; estradiol and Premarin® are prescribed to medicate menopause symptoms, provide birth control, and other hormonal replacement therapies; androgens are made use of for muscle enhancement by athletes and during androgen deficiency. Other medicines, such as Paracetamol, a very common pain-relieving medicine, also have endocrine disrupting effects,10 as do many artificially produced chemicals, such as Bisphenol A (BPA), which is found in plastic bottles and containers, dental materials, paper receipts and food tins. Numerous studies claim that BPA elevates rates of breast and prostate cancer, decreases sperm count, and causes reproductive problems that include early puberty as well as other neurological difficulties.11 Other agents are found in softeners in plastics, flame-retardants in clothing, electronic devices, synthetic fragrances, cleaning products, and phthalates in cosmetics. Further complicating issues of toxicity, researchers also warn about the cocktail effect — the combined impact of multiple chemicals may add up to worse effects than each substance on its own.
With regard to environmental pollution, problematically, these artificially produced hormones have a longer degrading time than more naturally occurring hormones. Sewage works are not built to filter drugs and other endocrine disruptors from waste water.12 Consequently, these substances pass through water systems and end up back in our environments.13 A Danish study showed that estrogen leak into aquatic environments from farming manure distributed in the soil, and water analysis revealed the spread of this hormone pollution.14 Furthermore, twenty-three different kinds of medications were found in a perch caught in the Fyriså, central Uppsala, Sweden.15 In the U.S., “A U.S. Geological Survey on 140 waterways in 30 states tracked 95 different pollutants, with some surprising results: 74% of the samples contained insect repellents; 48% contained antibiotics; 40% contained reproductive hormones (e.g., birth control pill estrogen and progestin); 32% contained other prescription drugs; and 27% had chemicals used for fragrances.”16
7 See Monica Lind and Lars Lind, “Circulating Levels of Bisphenol A and Phthalates are Related to Carotid Atherosclerosis in the Elderly,” Atherosclerosis 218.1 (September 2011): 207–13.
8
Ernie Hood, “Are EDCs Blurring Issues of Gender?” Environmental Health Perspectives 113.10 (October 2005): 670–77.
9
Nancy Langston, Toxic Bodies and the Legacy of DES (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010).
10
David Møbjerg Kristensen, Ulla Hass, Laurianne Lesné, Grete Lottrup, Pernille Rosenskjold Jacobsen, Christèle Desdoits-Lethimonier, Julie Boberg, Jørgen Holm Petersen, Jorma Toppari, Tina Kold Jensen, Søren Brunak, Niels E. Skakkebæk, Christine Nellemann, Katarina M. Main, Bernard Jégou, and Henrik Leffers, “Intrauterine Exposure to Mild Analgesics is a Risk Factor for Development of Male Reproductive Disorders in Human and Rat,” Human Reproduction 26.1 (November 2010): 235–44.
11
Hiroyuki Okada, Takatoshi Tokunaga, Xiaohui Liu, Sayaka Takayanagi, Ayami Matsushima, and Yasuyuki Shimohigashi, “Direct Evidence Revealing Structural Elements Essential for the High Binding Ability of Bisphenol A to Human Estrogen-Related Receptor-,” Environmental Health Perspectives 116.1 (January 2008): 32–38.
12
“Report: Avloppsreningsverkens förmåga att ta hand om
läkemedelsrester och andra farliga ämnen,” Naturvårdsverke (February 2008); naturvardsverket.se /Documents/publika tioner/620-5794-7.pdf; Sandra Steingraber, Living Downstream: An Ecologist’s Personal Investigation of Cancer and the Environment (New York: Da Capo Press, 2010).
13 Steingraber, Living Downstream
14
Jeanne Kjaer, Preben Olsen, Kamilla Bach, Heidi C. Barlebo, Fleming Ingerslev, Martin Hansen, and Bent Halling-Sørensen, “Leaching of Estrogenic Hormones from Manure-Treated Structured Soils,” Environmental Science and Technology 41.11 (June 2007): 3911–917.
15
Jerker Fick, Richard H. Lindberg, Lennart Kaj, and Eva Brorström-Lundén, “Report: Results from the Swedish National Screening Programme 2010: Sub-Report: Pharmaceuticals,” IVL: Swedish Environmental Research Institute (December 2011), ivl.se /download/18.694ca 0617a1de98f473943 /1628417294174 /FULLTEXT01.pdf.
16
Elizabeth Lee Vliet, It’s My Ovaries, Stupid (New York: Scribner, 2003).
17
Lori Ann Thrupp, “Sterilization of Workers from Pesticide Exposure: The Causes and Consequences of DBCP-induced Damage in Costa Rica and Beyond,” International Journal of Health Services 21.4 (1991): 731–57; William Henriques, Russel D. Jeffers, Thomas E. Lacher Jr., and
Although endocrine disrupting pollution affects the whole world, it is relevant to ask which human populations are most exposed and where? Reports notify of banana plantation workers that become sterile, have increased cancer risk, or die from poisoning.17 Premature breast development in children may be due to exposure to agricultural pesticides.18 Thrupp analyzed the causes for sterilization of banana plantation workers in Costa Rica and concluded that the determinants were “dominance of short-term profit motives, and the control over information and technology by the manufacturers (who concealed early toxicological research evidence of the reproductive hazards) and by the managers of the banana producer companies.”19 The working classes in developing countries are experiencing greater exposure to weed killers, insecticides, industrial chemicals, and medications, which are banned in neighboring countries. While insecticides, such as DDT, are banned in many industrial countries, their use is continued in developing countries, and they are spread through the atmosphere. As such, endocrine disruptors disturb multiple boundaries: of sexes, generations, races, geographies, nation-states, and species.20 This increasing threat of toxicity has, for good reason, prompted media attention. Many news outlets are reporting these frightening endocrine tales from our backyards. In an effort to gain ratings and readership by covering these issues, the media has gaslighted a Frankenstein metamorphosis that threatens sex and sexuality. Rather than addressing the many other health risks associated with toxic exposure, the most sensational and polemical issues stand in for debate and critical response. This raises questions: why is sex more central than cancer, autoimmune disease, and even death? What cultural nerves (many of which are globalized), are triggered? And, for those of us with feminist concerns, how do we reorient the debate away from essentialism, sexism, and heteronormativity?
POLLUTION PANIC
Issuing a transex panic — and here, transex takes up Myra Hird’s articulation of “trans” as a biological emergence, a becoming multiple 21 — National Geographic published a spate of articles with titles such as “Female Fish Develop ‘Testes’ in Gulf Dead Zone,” 22 “Sex-Changing Chemicals Found in Potomac River,” 23 and “Animals’ Sexual Changes Linked to Waste, Chemicals,” 24 all of which champion the connection between pollution and the undermining of sexual differences.25 In an effort to raise awareness about the dangers of pollution, these write-ups rely on sensational titles that
RIAN CIELA HAMMOND
an artist and biologist creating media-expansive artworks that invite people to examine the interactions between technology, power, and ways of knowing and being a body
● Munsee Lenape Territory (Jersey City), New Jersey, USA
KRYSTAL TSOSIE
an Indigenous geneticist and bioethicist advocating for Indigenous genomic data sovereignty
co-founder of the Native BioData Consortium—the first nonprofit research institute led by Indigenous scientists and tribal members in the United States ensuring that advances in genetics and health research benefit all Indigenous people
● Diné/Navajo Nation, Arizona, USA
REFUSAL AND AUTONOMY WITHIN COLONIALLY MEDIATED MOLE-
CULAR RELATIONS
What does an anti-colonial science look like?
What does bio-colonialism mean historically and presently in the ongoingness of settler colonialism?
This contribution begins with the script, screenshots, and visuals from Rian Ciela Hammond’s recent short film Root Picker—a queer nature documentary centered around wild yams who were historically the main feedstock globally for the production of steroid hormone pharmaceuticals. Through this ecological, historical excavation, hormones are understood as colonial artifacts—microbeings colonized by binary gender ideology and some of the first “natural substances” to be patented, opening the door for the patenting of genes, cells, microbes, and plants. The script of Root Picker is followed by Hammond’s conversation with Dr. Krystal Tsosie. Together they discuss what bio-colonialism is and does historically and presently in the ongoingness of settler colonialism, what an anti-colonial science looks like, how biomolecules can be decolonized, and why “open source science” can serve as a tool of oppression, deepening pre-existing global intracommunal disparities and aiding extractive practices like bio-commercialism or bio-colonialism.
Refusal and Autonomy within
Colonially-Mediated
Molecular Relations:
Root Picker in Conversation with Geneticist and Bioethicist
Dr. Krystal Tsosie
(Fig. 01)
RIAN CIELA HAMMOND & KRYSTAL TSOSIE
Rian Ciela Hammond, Root Picker, 2021, video still, HD video, color, sound. All images courtesy of the author.
(Figs. 02–03)
Pages from the script of Root Picker, 2021, HD video, color, sound.
ROSÆ CANINE COLLECTIVE
Bethsabée Elharar-Lemberg, Maïwenn Le Roux, Elena Souvannavong
a collective of activist and feminist herbalists fighting for the reappropriation of bodies
● France, en itinérance
MARIANA RIOS SANDOVAL
an anthropologist trying to make sense of accelerated environmental change and damage through writing, film, sound making, and collaborative experiments
● Ile de France/Mexico City
“Rosa Luxemburg, Parks, Bonheur... So many militant women who bear in their name the symbol of the free spirit and the strength of the rose.”
POSTINDUSTRIAL SELFGYNECOLOGY PLANT MANUAL
“The reputation of plants sometimes precedes them. They whisper into our ears keys for healing. Rumors are to be taken seriously and delicately in order to understand their origins and their subtleties.”
“Rose hip seeds with stinging hairs, gratte-culs, could be used as delicious weapons by knowledgeable avengers. Joyful and subversive, the rose has been recognized for its benefits since antiquity. Legend has it that it was named rosa canina in reference to the use Romans made of it to treat dog bites.”
“If I were a plant, I would be a weed, an invasive plant with spontaneous growth, a wild plant that intrudes into unstable and disturbed soils.”
Taking root in feminist self-help health practices and herbal healing traditions, this essay playfully weaves photography and drawings, prose and posology. As in a botanical guided exploration, it creatively engages with a series of plants of gynecological use that can be found in fields, mountains and urban parks througout France. These plants are a means to access and heal bodies and subvert power relations. They attest to the blurry boundaries between compounds—metabolites, industrial chemicals, hormones, prescription drugs, pollutants—making up the molecular conversations going on in and between bodies and landscapes. Finally, the vegetal beings featured in this chapter embody some of the perils, pleasures, and paradoxes of healing with plants in times of environmental crisis.
Post-Industrial Self-Gynecology Plant Manual
1
A combination of two antiretroviral drugs, Truvada is currently used for prevention through PrEP (preexposure prophylaxis), or as treatment for people living with HIV.
2 Vita Sackville-West was a British poet, novelist, essayist, biographer, translator and gardener. She is also known for helping to create her gardens at Sissinghurst Castle in Kent, for her exuberant aristocratic life, her strong marriage to Harold Nicolson, and her passionate affairs with women such as Violet Trefusis and the novelist Virginia Woolf.
3
Cy Lecerf Maulpoix, Écologies déviantes: Voyage en terres queers (Paris: Cambourakis, 2021). This, and all subsequent translations, unless noted otherwise are by the authors.
“Deviant existences face a great challenge. That of making of their own medicinal and medicated gardens, their soils of hormones and Truvada1 , something other than a dying land governed by the law of the market and capitalism. For flowers are always a little mutant, Vita Sackville-West2 reminds us; behind the appearance of a technical system, their genetically modified colors have the depth of our attachments, our desires and our intimate and collective needs. Faced with the great redemptive enterprises that would seek to expel by force the deviant subjects out of their purified spaces, what will be our perverse flora and what ecosystems can they invent?”3
This post-industrial self-gynecology plant manual can be read front to back or back to front. On polluted days or under a clear blue sky. It reads well overlooking the sea, at the break of dawn, or in a packed subway at rush hour. It can be read alone but is best enjoyed with others. It does not contain medical advice, yet in it you will find valuable, emancipating knowledge to take care of your health.
Botanical walks and cueillettes, the French word for plant picking or harvesting, inspire and structure the manual. As you will see we walked and harvested for different reasons: to get to know a landscape, other people and ourselves, to raise awareness, to heal. In the following pages, you will find plant portraits including some guidance on how to use them, and a few entries to our harvest diaries, our journal de cueillettes. Our texts are diverse, even disparate. We hope together they convey a complex picture. This text is the result of cross contamination and pollination as we believe purity is a fiction that can be deadly. We are mutants. And sometimes we are enraged mutants,
longing for not-so-distant futures where there is room for hope, desire, and all forms of life. In the meantime, with plants as our allies, we walk, harvest, and fight together.
JOURNAL DE CUEILLETTE Elena I Interactions 26 January 2022
In October, we were walking in the countryside to pick mushrooms.
Essential breaths.
From amanites to clitocybes, our wicker basket was full of comforting fall colors.
Settling down together is lonely and makes you look for love everywhere in the fields, around a home that is not yet yours.
It makes you glean love to nibble joyfully on its flesh.
The pleasure of “what is next”— looking for mushrooms to find apples, cenelles, and rose hips.
Picking with someone is the most touching thing in the world for me.
I always mark on my harvest tags who I picked with. As if to remind myself that the plant is our spectator, and that each person who ingests it will be imbued with the love of our connection at that moment. I remember the savory in the Quint Valley, picked naked, with B. When we were trying to make ourselves invisible to the cars passing by on the side road, giggling. Yarrow picked with L. at my mom’s house, just before stealing a flag at the firemen’s ceremony when we were in love. Of beech buds confined with P. at the villa…
Like a photograph, the medicinal plant sends me back the image of a moment: it is already healing me.
1 May 2022
“Everything” is part of me.
Leaving on an April afternoon. Walking, always on the same path. In the shade of the hazel trees, the wind is cool. There are cows in the field above. With horns. Red.
There is in my field of vision the 4G antenna that always pierces my eyes, wide open. Blinded by a thousand infinite grasses that fill every crumb of emptiness in the landscape. Like an unlimited pattern. Unlimited of unlimited. And barbed wire along my path. Around my house there are many small paths, hidden between two fields, suitable for love. Humans like to divide the landscape to find themselves.
(Figs. 01–03) Drawings, 2022, by Elena.
a choreographer, dancer, performer, researcher, and bruja practicing somatic body-mind centering
a founder of Artincidence dance company and co-founder and co-curator of the FIAP Martinique (Festival International de l’Art de la Performance)
● Martinique
ENSARGASSE -MOI
“I am contaminating sargassum just as it contaminates us. When I say ‘us,’ I mean the natives of Martinique, we who are subject to sargassum and its nauseating toxic gases emitting heavy metals, massively piled up and drying on beaches, we who are forced to move elsewhere because we live too close to the shore.”
In this contribution by Annabel Guérédrat—consisting of a statement in which she reflects on her performative rituals and a speculative narrative Mammisargassa 2.0 — we are introduced to her decolonial ecofeminist practice in which intimacy and politics are intrinsically entwined. Guérédrat gives insight into her performative rituals with the sargassum seaweed that is invade the coasts of Martinique, and which contains a large number of heavy metals, alongside organic compounds including contamination by the now prohibited insecticide chlordecone. Nestling in the sargassum, engulfing herself in the seaweed, Guérédrat intoxicates herself with heavy metals and inorganic arsenic, contaminating herself. Mobilizing Afro-diasporic bruja witch power, she embodies a Caribbean heroine who has survived despite the years, centuries of colonization, contamination, occupation.
Ensargasse-Moi: The Body of a Contaminated Caribbean Witch Decolonizes Herself
I consider my performances to be instances of care, rituals that reconnect me to the invisible world, the archetypal world. By burying myself in sargassum while knowing that this seaweed is a potential health hazard, I am creating the magical act of colonizing in turn this seaweed that is colonizing us.
I am contaminating sargassum just as it contaminates us. When I say “us,” I mean the natives of Martinique — we who are subject to sargassum and its nauseating toxic gases emitting heavy metals, massively piled up and drying on beaches, we who are forced to move elsewhere because we live too close to the shore.
Through this act of witchcraft, of magic, I understand that I will be reborn differently when I emerge from the seaweed. That I will have made them mine. That they will have stuck to my skin, burrowed in my mucous membranes, into my private parts, that I will have made love with them. The land of Martinique is already contaminated by chlordecone. And chlordecone can accumulate in sargassum, sometimes in high concentrations.
So this is where the bruja, the witch, comes in to develop care in a contaminated environment, while waiting for reparations. When Malcom Ferdinand says that this chlordecone affair sends us back to the dehumanization of our people, it’s a strong statement! That’s why becoming a sargassum woman may be an act of witchcraft that I assume in order to rehumanize myself. In this all-encompassing globalized world that ferociously swallows up the slightest individual initiative, sensitive on the surface of my own skin, among the sargassum, I mobilize Afro-diasporic bruja witch power. By sargassumating myself a bit more each day, I extract myself from a form of globalized witch politics to make my witch, a living bruja in the Caribbean, anchored on this land of Martinique, a heroine of the current era who has survived despite the centuries of colonization, contamination, and occupation.
My commitment to resilience and transcendence, my life force, my creative force, and my Afro-diasporic religious rituals, allows me to move the cursor, and the apprehension between witch, whiteness, Europeanness, Middle Ages, Christian Occident and bruja, metisse, Afro-diasporic rituals, Ebbo, contemporary, insularity, Caribbean region linked to the all-encompassing world. Through these acts of
sargassumated bruja, I revivify my Caribbean witch genealogy, my relationship with my body, this contaminated Afro-diasporic feminist figure who contaminates in turn.
I don’t identify as a disaffected human being in need of natural spaces to feel better. On the contrary, my relationship with sargassum is full of affection, sweat, stink, flesh and bone, and poison. I become wild with the seaweed; I have made it mine, and it is now part of my intimacy.
I am alive. And I create an act through sargassum. This is what I take away from my sargassumation, my sargassum burial. I become a black, metisse heroine, attracted and intimately connected to trash, to this invasive and toxic, contaminating nature. I am a contaminated heroine. A living and surviving archive, like the living plankton and nematodes living in sargassum.
an artist and lecturer thinking through issues of materiality, touch, and toxic embodiment to question ideas of the natural in relation to marginalized communities
● London, UK, and Cairo, Egypt
ADHAM FARAMAWY
SKIN FLICK
“I wish I could change my body at will, become someone else, become something else, something both more and less than human.”
Adham Faramawy has included the script and stills from their 2019 video Skin Flick—a work exploring desire, gender, and skin as both a physical and political boundary. Their contribution examines bodies absorbing and interacting with organic matter and chemicals such as beauty products, drugs, and supplements. In so doing, it draws attention to the porosity of our skin, and entanglements with more-than-human ecologies of bodily fluids, ointments, creams, environmental contaminants, bacteria, and other microorganisms. Skin Flick explores and celebrates the non-human desires of fungi and asexual marine invertebrates, investigating ideas of gender fluidity and inviting a new perspective on human appetites and behaviors.
Skin Flick
IN THE GARDEN
Remember that time we were out on the lawn? We were surrounded, enveloped by the sound of crickets, we couldn’t tell if it was dawn or dusk, but there we were, playing. Our bodies splayed out, coiled, ready to jump into action, just like the insects.
I think about that time, about your touch, about your hands, your fingers and mine, sliding and wiping, smearing ointments and creams on yourself and on each other.
I dreamt I touched your skin, my fingers slid straight through. Your skin dried out by wind and sun propelling hydration with a cream that’s not a cream. Foaming, frothing, fizzing, keeping your skin moist. You buff with fruit extracts. Wet your face a little, rub around your nose avoiding your eyes. You smell like walnuts, vanilla milk toner. Where’s your foaming face wash? Where’s your serum, your moisturizer?
You feel … fresh.
The image of my fingers reaching for the doorknob, it’s oily, they slip and nothing happens. My hands are still covered in soap, one leg still in the shower. My body stretched out across the room, thinking you’re on the other side of the door.
I’m still the coke and the ice cracking as you pour me. We could sit together knowing the tension, not addressing it, just like the time I was kissing the back of your knee and you looked down and spat at me.
I never liked it when you spat at me. You told me it was lust but your eyes betrayed you. The white of your skin threatening to ooze caramel from your pores. You tell me I have a problem with body fluids and I should figure it out but you’ll stop. And you did, you stopped, but I’ve learned my lesson and I don’t want you near me. Your words are sticky and stupid, and they’re running down my leg.
(Figs. 01–03) Adham Faramawy, In the Garden, still from Skin Flick, 2019. These and all subsequent images courtesy of the author.
THE BUDDLEIA
My studio is by some train tracks. In the summer the route is lined by roses, celandine, oxlip, daisies, dandelions, and a flowering bush called a Buddleia (davidii). The Buddleia (davidii), also known as the butterfly bush, is native to the Sichuan and Hubei Provinces of China. They are hermaphroditic, with perfect flowers, rich in nectar, and strongly scented of honey. In 1887, an Irish sinologist sent its seeds from Ichang to St. Petersburg. They are well travelled, often classed as an invasive species. They have been naturalized in Australia and in most cities in southern Europe, but are classed as invasive in the UK and New Zealand, and as a noxious weed in several North American states.
(Fig. 04) Adham Faramawy, The Buddleia, still from Skin Flick, 2019.
an artist and activist with a multi-disciplinary practice addressing themes of language, queerness, sickness, and the welfare state
● London, UK
“I hear on the radio that every cell in your body knows what your sex is and behaves accordingly. Your kidney knows if it is a male kidney or a female kidney. So can a kidney know it is a confused-as-fuck kidney, a neither/nor kidney?”
OUTWITH AND WITHDRAWN
Outwith and Withdrawn is an adaptation of the 2016 film Approach/Withdraw by Juliet Jacques and Ker Wallwork— a ten-minute experimental 16mm film exploring how public understandings of estrogen and endocrine-disrupting chemicals affect the sense of self and relationships of trans people and those who feel at odds with their assigned gender. As Wallwork reflects on the process of making of the film, stills from the film and extracts of the script, written collaboratively with Jacques, intersect and intertwine with their memories, thoughts, and desires. Shifting between the past and the present and between the passages from the script and experiences and events of Wallwork’s life, the narration explores conflicting, yet interconnected thoughts, feelings, and perceptions encountered at the intersection of queerness and sickness.
Outwith and Withdrawn
Outwith and Withdrawn is an adaptation of the 2016 collaborative film Approach/Withdraw by Juliet Jacques and Ker Wallwork, commissioned as part of the Wellcome funded BFI, no.w.here and King’s College project Queering Love, Queering Hormones.
Approach/Withdraw is a ten-minute experimental 16mm film, which explores how public understandings of estrogen and endocrine-disrupting chemicals affect the sense of self and relationships of trans people and those who feel at odds with their assigned gender. The script was written through conversation between the artists, then blurred into a single shifting voice which encompasses conflicting but related experiences surrounding hormones. It was intended to create a narrative which refuses the simplistic arc of traditional trans and romantic narratives, which present love and identity according to the logic of pursuit and conquest. Alongside archive and research material, the film visually explores materials which are known, or suspected, to cause hormonal changes in the body.
Extracts of the script, written collaboratively with Juliet Jacques, are indicated by italics.
(Fig. 01) Still Approach/Withdraw, 2016. Photo and all subsequent images courtesy of the author and Juliet Jacques.
I’m sat at work, on a yellow chair at a white table with a green mug of coffee.
The chair is plastic, plastics give off Xenoestrogens
Xenoestrogen
Xeno—foreign
Estrus—sexual desire
Gene—to generate
Fo-reign-oes-tro-gen
The Milk in the coffee is soya
Soya contains isoflavones, a phytoestrogen
Phytoestrogen
Phyto—plant
Estrus—sexual desire
Gene—to generate
Phy-toes-trogen-horse
According to imaging studies, estrogen can cause growth and depletion in the brain. Traditional fermentation of soy products reduces the levels of plant estrogens two- to-threefold. Modern factory processes do not. Can I feminize my brain over breakfast?
(Fig. 02) Still from Approach/Withdraw (2016).
Going into the project, I falsely considered the body an autonomous entity that could be consciously altered through science — a closed system that hormones would develop in predictable and knowable ways. I came to understand myself as a porous and leaking system living within a sea of endocrine disrupters whose interactions could not be known. The work was particularly shaped by Dr. Celia Roberts’ writing on the environmental proliferation of endocrine disruptors. Our material choices for the visuals of the film were guided by her lists of commonplace products whose chemicals could be received by our bodies as stealth signals, a form of coded communication involving non-linear relationships between chemical signals and where those signals interact. I found the idea that one of capitalism’s inadvertent consequences could be the wide scale feminization of the population at large almost comical. What could be queerer than fucking with your hormones using scatter cushions and a nice new rug — consumerism’s dark joke.
(Fig. 03) Still from Approach/Withdraw (2016).
COLLABORATORY
Jacquelyne Luce with Vrisha Ahmad, April Albrecht, Sarah Hyde, Amanda Kearney, Lainie LaRonde, Alek Meyer, Cassie Pawlikowski, Karisa Poedjirahardjo, Emily Pollack, Anjali Rao-Herel, and Ella Sevier a transdisciplinary collaboratory committed to engaged, collective, and collaborative inquiry in the field of feminist technoscience governance studies—employing reflexive queer feminist methodologies, and challenging disciplinary and temporal constraints of knowledge-making
● South Hadley, Massachusetts, USA
RETROSPECTIVE EXPOSURE
What associations are made between in utero exposure to diethylstilbestrol (DES) and experiences or understandings of gender/sex/sexuality?
How did DES exposure impact gender and sexuality outside the arena of reproductive health?
Why does the idea that DES is a cause of queerness/transness hold currency for some individuals?
What informs the belief that DES exposure could have caused queerness/transness?
Why were questions about the impact of DES exposure on gender/ sex/sexuality marginalized?
This contribution by Feminist Technoscience Governance Collaboratory (FTGC) brings together excerpts from archival research and in-depth interviews with people who believe they were exposed in utero to diethylstilbestrol (DES), a synthetic estrogen and endocrine disruptor, to explore how circulating knowledge about DES continues to shape understandings of gender/sex/sexuality. The interwoven reflections and perspectives bring the theoretical offerings of their interlocutors and themselves into conversation, illustrating the work of navigating sites and styles of knowledge-making and drawing out queer and trans disarticulations from DES activism and research. The contribution draws on qualitative research, analysis, and writing undertaken for “The DES Project” (2017 to 2022). FTGC recognize the core contributions of Jacquelyne Luce, Sarah Hyde, and Alek Meyer in bringing their work into this current form.
Retrospective Exposure: Tracing Narratives of Chemically Induced Transgressions
FRAMING TRANSGRESSION
1 Rebecca Troisi, Julie Palmer, Elizabeth E. Hatch, William C. Strohsnitter, Dezheng Huo, Marianne Hyer, Karen I. Fredriksen-Goldsen, Robert Hoover, and Linda Titus, “Gender Identity and Sexual Orientation Identity in Women and Men Prenatally Exposed to Diethylstilbestrol,” Archives of Sexual Behavior 49 (February 2020): 447.
2 DES was originally authorized for use in relation to “symptoms” of menopause in 1941 and then for complications of pregnancy in 1947. DES was also used in the clinical management of intersex variations, castration of gay men, and to stunt the growth of more than above average height in girls, all treatments based on (entangled) notions of normal and deviant gender, sex, and sexuality. In this contribution, we limit our discussion to in utero exposure.
Jacquelyne:
Would it make a difference to you...Or, does it make a difference, if DES [exposure] is related to bisexual feelings or desires?
Sally:
Yes, it does. It makes a huge difference. And the reason for that is [that] people who are bisexual, lesbians, or gays who are genetically conceived that way, to me, that tells me that their experience is really...it goes back to the beginning, to conception. That, for them, is healthy behavior. For me, with DES, the bisexual behavior that I have is from the pathology. (DES Project interview)
In February 2020, Troisi et al. published an article in Archives of Sexual Behavior entitled “Gender Identity and Sexual Orientation Identity in Women and Men Prenatally Exposed to Diethylstilbestrol.”1 Diethylstilbestrol (DES) is a synthetic estrogen that was prescribed to millions of pregnant people, resulting in the in utero exposure of millions of offspring.2
One of many articles that have appeared over the past decades to take up the question of whether and/or how hormones influence, or even determine, gender/sex/ sexuality, the article is particularly interesting due to the fact that it is based on analyses of data from members of the official combined cohort of the DES Follow-up Study.3 This cohort, established in 1992 by combining participants with a confirmed in utero exposure to DES and unexposed controls from previous studies, has received a study questionnaire at regular five-year intervals since 1994, thereby providing a means of studying the (emergent) effects of DES over time. In 2016, the latest (and possibly last) survey of the DES Follow-Up Study was administered to 3306 assigned female at birth and 1848 assigned male at birth individuals (exposed and unexposed). The publication of “Gender Identity” coincided with analyses we were undertaking on the “DES Project,”4 in which we explore how circulating knowledge about DES continues to shape scientific and everyday understandings of gender/sex/sexuality. In contrast to Troisi et al., we work with narratives of those who believe they were (or most likely could have been) exposed to DES. Many interlocutors in our project, whether interviewees or figures in archival material, do not have a confirmation of DES exposure. They would not have qualified as research participants for the Troisi et al. study.5 Furthermore, our project does not address whether DES-exposed individuals are more or less likely to identify as or belong to gender or sexual identity minority groups. Instead, we’re interested in why such questions are posed, who poses them and how, and the contexts in which ideas, knowledge, and understandings about DES’s potential to affect or define gender/sex/sexuality circulate.
The idea for the DES Project was sparked by reference to “gender issues” on the initial versions of a poster advertising a symposium organized by DES Action USA at Mount Holyoke College in 2017 and questions that students posed during the conference about the exclusion of nonbinary exposed individuals from the categories of DES Daughters and DES Sons that are commonly used to describe people exposed in utero. Over a number of decades, DES Action USA had received inquiries about the possible biochemical effects of DES on gender and sexuality. Our contribution to this volume brings together excerpts from the DES Action USA archive, our DES Project archive (documents sent to us throughout the project), publicly circulating books and social media posts, and twenty-five in-depth interviews with people who believe themselves to be DESexposed.6 Queer feminist interventions challenge rhetoric often employed to garner support for regulatory action to
3 See dceg.cancer.gov /research/what-we-study /des-study.
4
“Embodying Transgenerational Exposure: Gender/ sex/sexuality and experiences of being DES-exposed,” otherwise known as the “DES Project,” was approved in September 2017 by the Institutional Review Board at Mount Holyoke College. It was supported by initial funding from DES Action USA and received on-going support for undergraduate student summer internships and research practicums from Mount Holyoke College. All names of interviewees and figures in archival material which are not also publicly available are pseudonyms in order to protect an individual’s privacy.
5 The scientific validity of the knowledge generated by the DES Follow-Up Study is thought to rest on the fact that the research subjects have a confirmed documentation of exposure. Study participants are limited to those enrolled in 1992 .cancer.gov/about-cancer /causes-prevention/risk /hormones/des-factsheet.
6 DES is understood to have primarily (but not exclusively) been prescribed to white women. Interviewees are predominantly white, with one interviewee self-identifying as Jewish and one as Portuguese. The socio-economic status of many had fluctuated throughout their life, enabling them to speak in relation to various experiences of income, livelihood, and education. We have not assigned definitive gender/sex/ sexuality identification labels to interviewees; rather, we hope to convey the complexity of such demographic categories throughout.
7 “Retrospective exposure assessment” involves retrospectively reconstructing possible exposure to toxins in order to develop more thorough estimates of exposure and epidemiological outcomes. See: Yu-Cheng Chen, Gurumurthy Ramachandran, Bruce H. Alexander, and Jeffrey H. Mandel, “Retrospective Exposure Assessment in a Chemical Research and Development Facility,” Environment International 39.1 (2012): 111 and Lesley Rushton, “Retrospective exposure assessment in environmental epidemiology,” Occupational and Environmental Medicine 66.9 (September 2009): 572.
8 Michael Pettit, “Becoming Glandular: Endocrinology, Mass Culture, and Experimental Lives in the Interwar Age,” American Historical Review 118.4 (October 2013): 1053.
9 Aimee Medeiros and Elizabeth Siegel Watkins, “Live Longer Better: The Historical Roots of Human Growth Hormone as Anti-Aging Medicine,” Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 73.3 (July 2018): 333–59; Cheryl Logan, Hormones, Heredity, and Race: Spectacular Failure in Interwar Vienna (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2013).
10
For rich analyses of the regulatory processes related to the approval of DES by the recently formed US Food and Drug Administration (FDA), see Susan Bell, “Gendered medical science: Producing a drug for women,” Feminist Studies 21.3 (Autumn 1995): 473; and, Nancy Langston, Toxic Bodies: Hormone Disruptors
address and contain the amount of endocrine disrupting chemicals in the environment, naming invocations of fear of variations in sex development and changes in reproductive behavior as queerphobic and transphobic. This rhetoric and these framings are nevertheless what interviewees and archival interlocutors often referred to as evidence of the harm inflicted by in utero exposure to DES. Adapting a concept from occupational and environmental health, we engage with “retrospective exposure”7 narratives of chemically induced gender/sex/sexuality transgression; narratives that emerge through a triangulation of mindbody experiences, engagement with knowledge about the mechanisms of DES and effects of exposure, and a reconstruction of exposure possibilities. The interwoven reflections and perspectives (in italics throughout) bring the theoretical offerings of our interlocutors and ourselves into conversation, illustrating the work of navigating sites and styles of knowledge-making and drawing out queer and trans disarticulations from DES activism and research.
EMERGING AND RETROSPECTIVE KNOWLEDGE
During the first half of the twentieth century, “prior to the discovery of DNA as the master molecule of the life sciences, hormones occupied a similar explanatory role by promising the secret behind vital processes.”8 Hormone rejuvenation therapy was a luxury sought out for the promissory potential of hormonal intervention to rejuvenate aging bodies.9 The initial uses of DES were closely tied to these hormonally-centered articulations of youthful sexuality in aging, and also integral to the gendered process of medicalizing and pathologizing changing levels of estrogen in menstruators at menopause. Synthesized in 1938 in England and never patented, DES emerged on the American market in 1941 as a cheaper alternative to the limited availability and expense of natural estrogens for clinical treatment. In 1947, the FDA granted approval for the use of DES in relation to pregnancy complications.10
MARNE LUCAS
a multidisciplinary artist working at the intersection of art, feminism, and health and the end-of-life doula whose practice is informed by the events and emotions of the community around her
● New York, USA
HRT {(^)} IRT
How might our thought processes, personal drive, and creativity be driven by hormonal changes?
What happens to our self-perception when hormone levels change? Are we still truly the person we thought we knew?
This visual essay explores hormones, hormonal medicines and experimentation with synthetic hormones, and hormone-disrupting chemicals through an “artveillance” practice. Using a feminist lens within the intersection of art and technology, artist Marne Lucas investigates the potential of infrared thermal imaging (IRT), a prevalent surveillance technology, to depict the hormone-related transformations of the human body. How might our thought processes, personal drive, and creativity be driven by hormonal changes? What happens to our selfperception when hormone levels change, such as in menopause or andropause? Are we still truly the person we thought we knew? And what can self-experimentation and biohacking do to the effects of aging, endocrine disruption, or evolutionary outcomes? Thinking with her artworks, created from the stills from her ongoing Transmundane infrared thermal video projects, Lucas reveals the magic and fragility of human existence embedded in more-than-human hormonal worlds.
HRT {(^)} IRT: Hormone
Replacement Therapy
Reimagined via Infrared Thermography
INTRODUCTION
In this visual essay, I explore hormones as they relate to birth, puberty, fertility and ovulation, pregnancy, gender affirming care, menopause and andropause, and the posthuman body. In recent years after menopause, I realized that not just my physical lifecycle but also my artistic interests and expression have been ultimately directed by my hormones. I clearly see that while my earlier artworks, made at the fertile ages of 20–35, were about the body, intimacy, and sexuality, I explored childbirth in my mid-thirties and when I went through a final hormonal peak — what I call an “extinction burst” of estrogen. After that, as I experienced perimenopause, I made an experimental film Haute Flash about the hormonal transition of menopause. Now, at the age of fifty-four, six years post menopause, I pursue artistic endeavors related to the final chapter of life: aging and dying and death.
(Fig. 01) Marne Lucas, Open Palms, 2022, IRT still. This image and all subsequent images courtesy the artist.
MARNE LUCAS
I use infrared thermal imaging (IRT) as a way of viewing the literal heat bodies and landscapes emit. IRT helps me to visualize the invisible, while referencing the invasive technology that is used publicly and privately for surveillance. Transporting the viewer into an “otherworld” space within art and technology, thermography captures the surreal beauty of heat-signatures radiating from the bodies, offering a glimpse of our temporal coalescence of ancient stellar energy: we are truly beings of light. The human body is luminous. Conceptually I interpret the body as part of the spirit world, and by extension, the lightbody can be viewed as post human.
The cosmos is within us. We are made of star-stuff. We are a way for the universe to know itself.
Carl Sagan
The heat-signatures captured by IRT show how incident energy — the measure of heat striking an object — dissipates, depicting the impermanence of energy. All objects above 0 degrees Kelvin emit thermal infrared energy. Forwardlooking infrared device (FLIR) thermal imagers can see objects regardless of the presence or lack of ambient light, depicting heat signatures expressed from objects and people invisible to the human eye. What is hot appears white, and cooler or wet objects appear black. Warm veins, cold extremities, and breath are visible in real time, without special effects. The visual appearance is quite arresting: objects, landscapes and people have seemingly black-andwhite negative film qualities, possessing a transparency and inner glow.
(Fig. 02) Marne Lucas, Celestial Navigator, 2022. Courtesy the artist.
a local nomadic wetlab focused on open technologies, hacktivism, and speculative design practice organized by Maddalena Fragnito and Zoe Romano since 2020
● Milan, Italy
LETTER NO.4
During the pandemic, how have the social distancing measures imposed for the containment of the SARS-CoV-2 virus and the enhanced relationship between humans and digital technologies modified the quality of the regulatory hormones inside the human body?
In what ways has this new hormonal balance transformed intra-species relations?
Carrying on their tradition of writing speculative letters, OBOT addressed their Letter No. 4 to the Gentle Entities of PULP (Multi-Purpose Prevention Presidium—a fictional agency for the protection of life, the microbiota that inhabits it, and the surrounding environment. With the focus on the changes in the production of hormone oxytocin during the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, the letter examines the entangled relationships between the quality of the population’s internal regulatory hormones, morethan-human intra-actions, and public health policies. Drawing on Dr. Jordi Gol’s definition of health as “that way of life that is autonomous, supportive and joyful,” the letter questions the dominant, positivist model of health focused on the body as a re/productive workforce and proposes an alternative conceptualization of a healthy body as that capable of experiencing joy in leisure, sexuality, relationships, and emotions.
On the Fall of Joy
Milan, 8 March 2022
1
The PULP (MultiPurpose Prevention Presidium) is a scientificcultural structure with technical-imaginative autonomy that carries out activities in public health, environment, nutrition, prevention, and safety in places of care work. The PULP has the function of archiving and mobilizing empirical research and situated knowledge within the de-surroundings. Born at the beginning of the twenty-first century, PULP is today’s primary node of collective data for protecting life, the microbiota that inhabits it, and the surrounding environment.
To the Gentle Entities of PULP,1
We are very grateful to present our last reflections to You, expecting that something will be useful for Your noble mission. Radical access and accessibility to technologies and scientific knowledge, also guaranteed by Your dedicated work, leads us today to some curious discoveries. With this letter, we would like to bring Your attention to an issue that we had the opportunity to observe directly. In recent times, our work has focused on “polarization,” that characteristic that dominates intraspecies human communication whose peak is dated with the onset of the Great Pandemic (GP) at the beginning of the second millennium. As is well known, the peak of polarization reached in the pandemic phase never reabsorbed, causing the collapse of what was called, not without hypocrisy, “liberal democracies.” The research we are presenting proposes the reactivation of some investigations on the GP period to make progress in the scientific understanding of the polarization phenomenon. Common sense holds that the polarization between humans was caused by social distancing measures imposed for the containment of the SARS-CoV-2 virus, such as prolonged lockdowns and curfews, schooling and working from home, and closure of public space. During that period, the condition of isolation — also characterized by claustrophobic phenomena created by confined spaces — multiplied and spread among the population. Although physical distance (1.5 meters between body and body) is a measure that has never been removed to ensure the continuous reopening of activities and workspaces, our research stems from questioning the assumption that restrictions imposed, during and after the Great Pandemic, are the origins of the peak of polarization of human communication. Moreover, since the GP, many people have learned to alleviate isolation through an increased use of the Internet. Several analysts agree that in 2020 alone, there was a global increase of users on social networks of about six percentage points and an average increase in connection time of about ten minutes per day — current data confirm the growth rate. By starting from this growing trend, the research submitted here critically questions the causal link between
pandemic isolation measures and the peak of human polarization through a dataset derived from new analyses of human chemical reactions in interaction with digital platforms. There is not much literature on the subject, dating back to the turn of the millennium. Most of the research was carried out by “Dr. Love,” a neuroeconomist called Paul J. Zak, and his research group.2 He published several studies on “digital oxytocin,” i.e., the release of oxytocin hormones (C43H66N12O12S2) due to interaction with social networks. According to the then well-known and controversial American neuroeconomist, oxytocin could not be relegated to the reproductive sphere alone, such as childbirth and breastfeeding, but played a crucial role in the mechanism underlying feelings of generosity and trust. Dr. Love argued that oxytocin was the main “glue” in society, so important to influence the economic trends of the population. He believed that the greater the release of oxytocin — primarily due to physical contact via proximity — the greater the trust between people and, finally, the greater the volume of financial transactions between them. From this equation, it is easy to understand Dr. Love’s focus on the releasing of digital oxytocin from human’s interaction with social networks.
2
Paul J. Zak and Stephen Knack, “Trust and Growth,” The Economic Journal 111.470 (2001): 295-321; Paul J. Zak, “Neuroeconomics,” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B 359.1451 (2004): 1737 1748; Michael Kosfeld, Markus Heinrichs, Paul J. Zak, Urs Fischbacher, and Ernst Fehr, “Oxytocin Increases Trust in Humans,” Nature 435.7042 (2005): 673 676; Paul J. Zak, “Moral Markets,” Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization 77.2 (2011): 212—33.
(Fig. 01) Digital Oxytocin. This image and all subsequent images courtesy of OBOT.
3 See “Neuroeconomics,” Wikipedia, en.wikipedia .org/wiki/Neuroeco nomics.
Although the phenomenon of “digital oxytocin” raises many questions, this research focused on a single query: is there a link between the polarization of social communication and the release of “digital oxytocin”? We considered it plausible that the reduction in intraspecies relational capacities was not a symptom of isolation per se but instead of the quality of the internal regulatory hormones released in the enhanced interaction with social networks that has occurred since the Great Pandemic. To test this hypothesis, we took a closer look at the chemical characteristics of “digital oxytocin.” The data collected in the early stages encouraged us to go further, it was clear enough that social networks’ effects on the population have received only partial scientific attention. The same fact that the bibliography is scarce and concentrated mainly within the field of neuroeconomics3 shows that the analysis of biological data in the process of digitizing life has been driven predominantly by economic interests.
4 Nora Heidorn, “Lavorare un turno doppio: la biopolitica del tempo ormonale,” in Coming Soon, ed. Mira Asriningtyas et al. (Roma: Nero Edizioni, 2018), 64–70.
5 Nelly Oudshoorn, The Male Pill: A Biography of a Technology in the Making (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003).
Having outlined the survey question, and before going into the details of the empirical research, we consider it crucial to direct some of Your valuable attention to frame the context from which the polarization phenomenon emerges: indeed, medical and corporate attention to hormone management is a long tradition. In the twentieth century, techno-scientific hormone research focused on regulating with-gestational-capacities-bodies: human and non-human reproductive bodies have been controlled and regulated to accelerate the production cycles. One thinks of the farming sector and its increased relation to hormones’ research and administration to increase and intensify the re/productive cycle of involved animals. But, as researcher Nora Heidorn points out, “hormonal time” — such as menstrual cycles, mood swings, energy levels, reproductive capabilities and aging processes — also became a biopolitical tool for managing human populations’ productivity around 1960.4 One thinks of the biotechnologies developed through synthetic hormones — i.e., the technology of hormone self-regulation as birth control pills — and how these did not merely free bodies from their biological constraints. On the contrary, their development and application have planned and policed the reproductive role of those same bodies. As health and technology theorist Nelly Oudshoorn explains, introducing the concept of “sex hormones” links the reproductive functions of with-gestational-capacities-bodies with laboratory practice and techniques. This connection highlights and emphasizes the reproductive role of such bodies, designating them as a “natural site of intervention.”5 The philosopher Michel Foucault introduces biopolitics, a new form of power
LENKA VESELÁ
an art-based researcher, lecturer, organizer, and feminist thinker advocating for inclusive forms of transdisciplinary knowledge production
● Brno, Czech Republic
How do we keep track of endocrine disruption?
How and with what effects is exposure to endocrine disrupting chemicals made (in)visible?
KEEPING TRACK OF ENDOCRINE DISRUPTION
How do we orient ourselves in the labyrinth of indirect evidence, unreliable facts, inconclusive research results, manufactured doubt, and normative assumptions?
How can we conceive of endocrine disruption without resorting to the ableism, heterosexism, and transphobia embedded in the normative imaginary of a toxin-free futurity?
How do we navigate the territories of the unknown and uncertain indicating harms but — possibly — also potentials of becoming with hormone-disrupting chemicals?
Developmental and lifetime exposure to endocrine disrupting chemicals via environmental pathways increases susceptibility to a wide range of pathologies in humans and animals. Effects on neurodevelopment and brain function, and thus also thoughts, feelings, and motivations, are among the adverse outcomes linked to exposure to chemical endocrine disruptors. Notwithstanding these factors, disrupted emotions are not commonly examined in connection to endocrine disruption. With the assistance of the Endocrine Disruption Tracker Tool— a speculative instrument utilizing disrupted emotions as an index of endocrine disruption—this contribution examines what we can learn about endocrine disruption if we consider how our emotions are affected. What are the critical and political potentials of thinking with and acting upon our emotions caused and modulated by involuntary chemical exposure?
Keeping Track of Endocrine Disruption
INTRODUCTION: BECOMING WITH ENDOCRINE DISRUPTING CHEMICALS
Among the hundreds of thousands of synthetic chemicals in existence, approximately 800 are either suspected or known to possess endocrine disrupting properties. Endocrine disruptors are industrially manufactured chemicals capable of mimicking or interfering with the way the body’s hormones work. Similar to physiologically produced hormones, chemical endocrine disruptors act as “chemical messengers” circulating through the bloodstream and informing the functions of organs and tissues. As hormone-disrupting chemicals able to “hack” the chemical information network of the body become ubiquitous in the environment, concerns have emerged regarding the extent to which humans are exposed to and affected by them. How dire a predicament have we reached? How do we keep track of endocrine disruption?
1 Åke Bergman, Jerrold J. Heindel, Susan Jobling, Karen A. Kidd, and R. Thomas Zoeller, eds., State of the Science of Endocrine Disrupting Chemicals 2012: Summary for Decision-Makers (United Nations Environment Programme and World Health Organization, 2013).
According to the State of the Science of Endocrine Disrupting Chemicals, a landmark review of the science of endocrine disrupting chemical agents released by the World Health Organization (WHO) and United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), the true extent of the exposure and consequences of chemical endocrine disruptors is yet to be fully understood.1 The report summarizes research findings evidencing that endocrine disrupting chemicals are causally implicated in adverse health outcomes in humans and wildlife, while also raising concern about the incompleteness of knowledge about the endocrine activity of environmentally ubiquitous chemicals:
“Because
2 Bergman et al., State of the Science of Endocrine Disrupting Chemicals 2012, 18.
only a small fraction of the hundreds of thousands of synthetic chemicals in existence have been assessed for endocrine disrupting activity, and because many chemicals in consumer products are not identified by the manufacturer, we have only looked at the tip of the iceberg.”2
Despite the proliferation of research on endocrine disrupting chemicals, significant uncertainties remain about the true extent of risks posed to human health and wildlife. Endocrine-related diseases and disorders are on the rise,
including hormone-sensitive cancers, lower sperm counts, infertility, endometriosis, early puberty, autoimmune diseases, diabetes, obesity, osteoporosis, cardiovascular problems, growth disorders, and neurological and learning disabilities, but is it plausible and scientifically demonstrable that chemical endocrine disruptors are among the causes? Endocrinerelated effects have been observed in wildlife populations in highly contaminated environments, but what do these observed changes in wildlife development and physiological functions tell us about the consequences for the human populations suffering chronic exposure to endocrine disrupting chemicals? Numerous laboratory studies have identified adverse outcomes of chemicals with endocrine disrupting properties, but how do findings focused on the selected effects of single chemicals under laboratory conditions bear upon real life conditions of humans and nonhuman organisms exposed to complex chemical mixtures on a daily basis throughout life?3
“How many endocrine disrupting chemicals are there? Where do they come from? What are the human and wildlife exposures? What are their effects individually and in mixtures during development and adulthood and even across generations? What are their mechanisms of action?”4 — these are some of the questions outlined in the WHO-UNEP report that demand urgent answers. Unfortunately, given the invisibility, penetrability, mobility, and complex interactivity of endocrine disrupting chemicals, many of these concerns remain largely unanswered. Studying chemical endocrine disruptors necessitates the examination of a plurality of interactive factors, including the net effects of complex chemical mixtures; tissue-specific responses; critical windows of exposure across lifespan; the intricate problematics of epigenetic effects, which alter susceptibility to diseases intra- and inter-generationally; and, anomalous dose-response relationships rendering even low-concentration exposure harmful. In sum, endocrine disruption is a complex, multilayered process, posing momentous challenges, not least for the gathering of scientific evidence.
The absence of irrefutable evidence makes chemical regulation both erratic and contestable. National and international legislative frameworks for the regulation of chemicals aim to ensure a high level of protection of human health and the environment. Such frameworks are developed and managed by national laws, national and international regulatory agencies, and international initiatives, agreements, and conventions. By defining policy elements, such as exposure or emission limits, and overseeing their enforcement, chemical regulators are just as influential as scientists, if not more
3
For methodological limitations in studying endocrine disrupting chemicals in human populations, see Duk-Hee Lee and David R. Jacobs, “Firm Human Evidence on Harms of Endocrine-Disrupting Chemicals Was Unlikely to Be Obtainable for Methodological Reasons,” Journal of Clinical Epidemiology 107 (2018): 107–15.
4 Bergman et al., State of the Science of Endocrine Disrupting Chemicals 2012, 18.
5 Reena Shadaan and Michelle Murphy, “Endocrine-Disrupting Chemicals (EDCs) as Industrial and Settler Colonial Structures: Towards a Decolonial Feminist Approach,” Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience 6.1 (Spring 2020): 1–36.
6 Indigenous studies scholar Eve Tuck uses the term “damage-centered research” to refer to research that documents people’s pain, brokenness, and suffering to hold those in power accountable for the oppression they have perpetrated. According to Tuck, the possible gains of research that describes people, communities, or environments as “toxic,” “polluted,” or “damaged” do not warrant the cost of thinking about ourselves or others in reference to these terms. Tuck urges communities, researchers, and educators to reconsider how research is framed and conducted and to rethink how research findings could be used by, for, and with communities. See Eve Tuck, “Suspending Damage:
so, in determining how the public perceives chemical pollution and its effects on the environment and human health. Under existing neoliberal governance systems, however, their regulatory decisions tend to be lax and industryfriendly, facilitating investments and economic growth rather than protecting public health and the environment. More often than not, controversies over the banning of chemical agents in industrial production are based on a utilitarian calculus of potential benefits and harms that exaggerate social and economic benefits of toxic chemicals while downplaying suspected or known costs to health of humans, nonhuman organisms, and the environment. Environmental justice researchers Reena Shadaan and Michelle Murphy refer to governance systems that justify the continued production of known toxins and “acceptable” risks to health as “permission-to-pollute regulatory systems” and point out their link to structures of settler colonialism and racial capitalism.5 Shadaan and Murphy dispute conceptualizations of endocrine disrupting chemicals that frame them as an issue of consumer products and plastic packaging and characterize their effects in terms of individual bodily damage and argue for strengthening decolonial feminist frameworks for understanding endocrine disruption. Such move demands suspending damage-cantered research — bringing our attention from the brokenness and suffering of the victims of pollution to the perpetrators of violence who must be made accountable for their action.6 Shadaan and Murphy also make a compelling case for investigating the infrastructures of settler colonialism and racial capitalism associated with oil extraction and refining, industrial emissions to air, and releases of water pollutants. Building on their argument, this essay contributes a systemic analysis of the interactions, power relations, and modes of governance that structure and sustain chemical violence. How are the flows of manmade chemicals managed and to what effects? What relations can we observe and analyze with regard to their production, application, and disposal? Industry-friendly regulatory policies are predicated upon systemic asymmetries that make it easy for the financial beneficiaries of chemical manufacturing to obscure, externalize, or buy their way out of their wrongdoings, while making it difficult for those on the receiving end to demand more stringent regulations or direct compensation. Preexisting structural inequalities are exacerbated when the burden of proof is placed on the victims of pollution rather than the perpetrator. Moreover, it is difficult to hold chemical companies accountable when only the high probability — rather than reasonable possibility — of adverse health
MARY MAGGIC
an artist and researcher working at the intersection of hormones, body and gender politics, and ecological alienations
● Vienna, Austria and Los Angeles, USA
TO STAND IN THE FIRE AND FEAR
What does it mean to find belonging in the molecular semiosphere?
How do current regimes of truth and purity act antagonistically toward this form of collectivization?
How can performative approaches towards biohacking open up new subjectivities for living in a toxic world that go beyond prescribed notions of normal and natural?
Through years of research through public workshopologies on the project Open Source Estrogen, biohacking methodologies have proven to serve far more than spreading didactic knowledge. These protocols that produce an existential knowing in our bodies and environments inevitably lead to a form of collective worlding and knowledging, strategies that may help us find a way out of ecological ruin. Combining biohacking with performative methods in a new dramaturgical workshop, “Performing the Sublime Sea of Co-Mattering,” participants embody the very agency of toxic molecules and their ongoing process of worlding, emerging on the other side with a radical breakage from the past.
To Stand in the Fire and Fear
PART ONE: An Existential Knowing
In the summer of 2015, during the Ars Bioarctica Residency in Kilpisjarvi Biological Station in the subarctic regions of Finland, I had the pleasure of meeting Canadian artist and professor, Byron Rich, who talked about the possibility of creating an open source recipe for the birth control pill. While this was a purely speculative conversation about extracting cholesterol from chicken eggs and chemically converting this pre-starter into its final estrogenic form, it opened my eyes to a disruptive potential of biohacking that exceeded its techno-utopian narratives in US mainstream media. I became aware of a kind of potential that re-established relationships between molecules and bodies. For the next two years or so, Byron and I, along with Hackteria members Špela Petrič and Transhackfeminists Paula Pin and Gaia Leandra among many others, collaborated on the recipes of Open Source Estrogen, which aimed at developing protocols for hacking hormonal molecules through detection and extraction, first as a scientific contestation against the institutional gatekeeping of knowledge and basic healthcare, then later as a collective strategy for revealing the bio-political presence of these molecules as capitalist industrial toxicities. When we disseminated Open Source Estrogen and its “freak-science” iteration Estrofem! Lab in the form of public participatory workshops, we initially took a very didactic approach. Using mobile laboratories outfitted into suitcases, we performed workshops for transgenic yeast bio-sensing, solid phase extraction with peristaltic pumps, and column chromatography with urinary hormones. Unsurprisingly, our protocols held a very practical, almost utilitarian promise for our participants who all wanted to increase their endocrino-logical knowledge. But what struck me most incisively in these workshops was the elephant in the room, the stone left unturned the unaddressed emotional affect of the participants. What sense do you get when you realize for the first time in your life how irreversibly contaminated the planet is, how every moment since you first gestated in your mother’s womb your body has been silently queering? What if you were someone who spent their whole life in the comfort of heteronormative existence only to find out that heteronormativity never existed in the first place? Most reactions I’ve received are panic, fear, and the dystopic feeling that one’s body has been stolen. I knew there was another battlefield ahead, one that dealt with the molecular traumas of an emotional and immaterial kind.
Anyone who has performed any type of biohacking, whether it is fermenting in the kitchen, tending to a garden, or co-existing with a non-human in a shared space, will know that biohacking eventually moves from the utilitarian into the subjective like the inevitable force of marbles gliding off an inclined surface. This is simply because hacking the black box of the material eventually leads to the hacking of its symbolic representations. When we hack hormonal molecules, we equally hack their codified definitions of masculinity, femininity, and reproductive futurism, no matter how socially entrenched they are. So, if biohacking remains in the purely utilitarian and techno-utopian realm, this disruptive practice would be falling short of its true potential. Media scholar Maria Rogg describes existential ways of knowing as a cultivation of knowledge that comes with the immeasurable lived experiences of embodiment, relationality and vulnerability. From experiential ways of learning and being together, biohacking must be framed as a socio-material practice of knowledging, one that activates through accidents and mishaps, co-generative play and jamming, public amateurism, and collective world-making. It is in this space of radical unknowingness that old ideas can be extinguished in service of new subjectivities to be generated.
Through years of researching Open Source Estrogen, the contestational ground on which the project performs its resistance has evolved, like peeling back layers of a fruit to get to the core essence of its flavor. It started first in experimenting with the ways an artist can gain access to scientific spaces and resources and confronting the institutional barriers along the way. First layer gone. Then came the ways an artist could open up critical spaces of knowledge production for the public engagement and performance of science. Second layer gone. Then came the protocols themselves and what new discoveries emerge once we reveal the molecules that were previously invisible to us. Third layer gone. Finally, we come to the critical threshold: what do we do now, knowing that these scandalous levels of estrogen are in the water supply? Or now that what we find in our bodies is actually an unruly composition of both natural and synthetic compounds? After this existential knowing is produced in these biohacking workshops, what are the next strategies that allow us to live, cope, and care in this permanently polluted world? How must these strategies extend beyond the scientific and the technical, and involve the work of ideologically, philosophically, and spiritually purging what no longer serves the public imaginary? What if the real work of biohacking was showing others how to stand directly in the fire and fear and say, “I’m here.”
1 Maria Rogg, “Biohacks of Biometric Existence,” paper presented at the 11th EFRC conference Social Change in a Feminist Perspective: Situating Gender Research in Times of Political Contention, Milano, 15–18 June 2022.
PART TWO: Alien Tendencies I Wish to No Longer Hide
Whatever it is we discover collectively in these hormone hacking workshops, one truth always remains: our bodies and our environments are much more alien than we suspected. The micro-plastics in our urine, breastmilk, and rivers, the occurrence of intersex frogs and fish, the decreasing distance between the anus and genitals, and all the mainstream stories of reproductive disruption and threats to species propagation are evidence of our malleable bodies. While there is undoubtedly the physical threat of mutation, disease, and death, there exists alongside it the toxic shame, the anti-disability sentiments, and all the various phobias associated with those labeled pathological and un-categorizable. In order to address this double trauma, I felt the need to create a fictional corporate brand, the Estroworld and its company slogan “We Are All Living in the Estroworld.” Living in the Estroworld means that, first, we all live under unprecedented levels of pollution and, second, that the all-too-common phobia-riddled response to this alienation freezes us in a state of panic that is both paralyzing and de-collectivizing.
(Fig. 01) Digital illustration from the interactive web project Estroworld Now, 2021. Image courtesy of the artist.
ALIENS IN GREEN
with the participation of Léonore Bonaccini, Ewen Chardronnet, Xavier Fourt, Špela Petrič, and Mary Maggic
a mobile investigation laboratory and tactical theater group developing inquiries into the alien agents of anthropocenic xenopower —reaching out and opening a critical public space by implementing intermedia processes that connect open-science, DIY practices, speculative narration, serious games, cultural intelligence, and science-fiction
BECOMING NON –ALIEN
“Do queers and our alien kin have no future in our increasingly toxic landscape?”
Exposure to synthetic chemicals interferes with human and nonhuman hormonal systems. Despite all the warnings about the toxic impacts of endocrine disruptors, the lobbying of the petro-chemical, agricultural, and pharmaceutical industries continue to influence regulatory institutions. These actors can be viewed as xeno-powers that both regulate and pollute our bodies and environment. At the same time, terms like “abnormal” or “disruptor” are at the center of most environmental and critical discourses, focusing the main arguments on sex-panic, gender ambiguity, and threats to reproductive futurism. These arguments reinforce a politics of purity that reflects our prescribed eco-hetero-normative value system. What is “normal” and “natural”? Do queers and our alien kin have no future in our increasingly toxic landscape? The Aliens in Green want to generate “a crisis of the body” that leads to non-prescriptive subjectivities, offering a kind of alien resilience called xeno-solidarity. In their provisional manifesto, we are invited to learn about their non-alien laboratory of commons —a place-in-becoming in which interspecific communities meet and form and that which does not yet exist comes into existence and materializes.
Becoming Non-Alien: Provisional Manifesto for a Laboratory of Recombinant Commons
RE-QUALIFYING THE LABORATORY
Aliens in Green is an agent from a planet-turned-laboratory. The laboratory is the place where that which does not yet exist comes into existence and materializes. With the laboratory-planet, the biosphere is itself transformed into a laboratory, affecting what we from the Cenozoic have known up until now.
The future, however, has not yet been created; the images coming from the future are materializing in various ways. Some of these images show a xeno-power that elicits the emergence of radically new entities forcing the evolution of living beings in unconcerted directions among species.
In the xeno-laboratory, we are witnessing and anticipating the emergence of the systems of our future subordination or extermination based on our alienation. Against this xeno-laboratory, Aliens in Green is positing the idea of a non-alien laboratory. This laboratory of commons, a place where interspecific communities meet and form, is a continuation of, rather than a break with, the community of beings we have been experiencing throughout the Cenozoic. This laboratory is a place-in-becoming, a place where the combination of living forms — their composition and articulation — is elaborated.
CULTIVATING AN ART OF COMBINATIONS
The art of combinations is aimed primarily at recomposing the commons in an odd world. The art of combinations is the art of symbiosis, a common thrust towards phusis, or the “self-giving-of-a-common-form.” Genetic recombination as well as genetic, hormonal, and chemical communication between species is multi-facetted and ongoing. Whereas sex was the pivotal issue of traditional biopolitics, connecting individuals and populations as well as citizens and states, the non-genealogical and lateral transfer of genes, molecules, and signals is what may enable us to better understand the making of new biopolitical connections — between persons and licenses, between human and non-human user communities, between polymorphisms and policies. These recombinations, which are immanent in society, must emancipate themselves from the specific standards of the bio-, chemo- and porno-industrial complex in order to bring forth
bodies and habitats that adapt to the beings living in them. This is why the critique of xeno-hormones, xeno-molecules, xeno-genes and xeno-(eco- or bio-)systems, and the critique of the xeno-powers that define their present and future orientations, are the necessary correlates of a recombinant common policy.
CULTIVATING AN ART OF COMPOSITION
A non-anthropomorphic approach to intelligence opens up new spaces of social composition. If we leave behind the anthropomorphic and cerebro-centric conceptions of intelligence and acknowledge instead that intelligence is distributed across all biotic flows — across all plant, animal, fungal and bacterial species — then the social and political compositions change radically. The phyto-oriented approach reconfigures our modes of operation by aiming to connect the reflexivity and the theoretical models inherited from western anthropoid culture with concrete modes of action generated by other biotic species and flows. Reflexivity, through its ability to render alien and create distance, can subvert the process of meaning and enable us to represent the unrepresentable. The non-anthropomorphic approach of affects also allows us to rethink the mediations between bodies and signifiers beyond identities and species, and to apprehend the flow of affects interconnecting and co-constituting bodies of different kinds.
CULTIVATING AN ART OF ARTICULATION
Articulation is a key concept in approaching the laboratorisation of the living and the ecosystem in capitalism if we do not want to limit our critique to economic approaches or class relations alone. The concepts of becoming-alien and becoming-non-alien enable us to articulate worlds in such a way that their potential antagonisms are neutralized. Their aim is to articulate or coordinate the various narratives revealing the anti-terrestrial spirit of capitalism and implementing the biospheric commons.
In short, they allow us to build counter-hegemonic narratives and devices as well as trans-specific solidarities that are simultaneously political, epistemological, technical, and strategic, and which in turn enable the convergence of anti-systemic struggles.
Act 1 • Consenting to the Authority of Science
(Fig. 01) Aliens in Green, Petro-Bodies and Geopolitics of Hormones, 2018. This diagram and all subsequent images courtesy of Aliens in Green.
alongside Liz Flyntz, Byron Rich is one half of Epicurean Endocrinology, an activist art research team interested in the intersection of science, culture, and food systems
● Meadville, PA, USA
EPICUREAN ENDOCRINOLOGY
How does the marketing of food products reinforce gender norms? What level of criticality does the general American public have concerning the foods they consume?
Epicurean Endocrinology: The Middle-American Grocery Store Index is intended to be read in the context of fieldwork and research on how the American grocery store is the epicenter of obfuscation of scientific data regarding food production and of manipulation of consumers through concerted greenwashing and gender-norm reinforcement. It is a visual index of foods that are a) gendered through marketing in order to market commodity crops and enforce gendered body discipline, and b) contain notable levels of endocrine disrupting compounds.
Commercial foods, such as packaged goods, quick meals, and shelf-stable snacks, are often produced using commodity crops that contain endocrine disrupting compounds or are packaged in endocrine disruptor-rich packaging materials. In some cases, these xenohormones are the result of biological processes that occur without human intervention, while in others they are due to methods of manufacture or packaging. Simultaneously, food manufacturers exploit gender anxiety and body shame in order to market value-added commercial food products. Gender-specific food products proliferate throughout grocery and convenience stores, promising increased and idealized feminine and masculine attributes to the buyer.
Epicurean Endocrinology: The Middle-American Grocery Store Index
Using food as a mechanism for social disruption and conversation, Epicurean Endocrinology occurs at the intersection of science, identity politics, and corporate interest. Through the project, we are taking a closer look at how industrial processes, specifically in industrial agriculture, introduce endocrine disruptors, particularly Atrazine and BPAs — wellknown “demasculinizing” and “feminizing” compounds — into the environment, animal bodies, and human bodies in service of profitability.
(Fig. 01)
Beyond the aforementioned demasculinizing and feminizing effects of endocrine disruptor proliferate in food systems, there are gendered attributes in their presentation and consumption. In many cultural contexts, certain foods are associated with masculinity and virility, or femininity and fecundity. This constellation of meanings function differently within specific spiritual and healing traditions. In the American capitalist tradition of food-as-product, foods are marketed to men (Burger King, Doritos, etc.) and women (salad, yogurt) with aspirational messages, promising to help consumers attain their culture’s gender ideals. While corporations honed these marketing strategies in the twentieth century, many new chemicals with hormonemimicking properties — endocrine disruptors, chemicals which endocrinologists now understand can alter sex-linked physical characteristics and reproduction on an ecosystem scale — wound up in the industrial food supply. Ironically, the gendered symbolism of food products and the sexual valence of their chemical contents often do not align. Epicurean Endocrinology pries open the gap between consumer symbolism and the workings of our industrial food system to enable a critical and empowering shift of perspective. American vernacular cuisine, and the ingredients that are staples in folk or “homestyle” food traditions in the United States, provide a fascinating platform to examine the aforementioned intersections of culture and bodies. “MiddleAmerica” refers to the so-called “flyover” states that encompass the vast American interior between the northeast megalopolis of Boston-New York-Philadelphia-Washington and the southwest coastal region of Los Angeles and San Francisco. Middle America is often referred to as “Real America” by politicians vying for votes in the vast center of the country where sentiments of “coastal elitism” prevail.
Giant Eagle grocery store shelf, Meadville, PA. This photo and all subsequent images courtesy of the author.
An example of American vernacular cuisine is “Cheesy Taco Bake,” a common middle-American dish, exemplifies the complexity of America’s relationship to its food systems. At once, it incorporates foods that are grown using endocrine disruptors as herbicides and pesticides (Atrazine, for example), foods that are packaged and processed using known endocrine disruptors (BPAs), and foods that use the tropes of American masculinity and exceptionalism in their packaging, while also appropriating elements of other cultural traditions. Cheesy Taco Bake contains many corn-based products — corn being the most widely produced crop in America, while also being the most likely to be grown using the well-known endocrine-disrupting herbicide Atrazine.
(Fig. 02) Canned corn.
(Fig. 05) Plastic packaging of industrially grown tomatoes.
(Fig. 03) Canned back beans.
(Fig. 06) Canned bean sprouts with cultural stereotypes depicted on the label.
Many of the regional homestyle dishes that seem the most comforting and familiar in American culture are often the most likely to contain endocrine-disrupting compounds due to agricultural, industrial, or pharmaceutical processes. These foods contain cheap, popular, broadly distributed “commodity crops,” such as seed oils, sugar, and grains which have been grown with known endocrine disruptor pesticides and herbicides. Or they may contain factory farmed and processed meats and dairy products derived from animals fed with industrially produced grains and treated with a variety of hormones. Plastics used in processing and packaging food products can also contribute detectable levels of endocrine disruptors.
Beyond the biological realities of homestyle cuisine, the ways in which these foods are marketed are often highly gendered, especially in the United States, where we are bombarded with imagery that reinforces heteronormative and patriarchal cultural constructs emblematic of the “nuclear family.” This cultural construction of family and corresponding “family values” are touted as the cornerstones of American capitalism and democracy.
Epicurean Endocrinology: The Middle-American Grocery Store Index is a visual catalog of common foods, food systems, advertising techniques, and processing techniques found in any middle-American grocery store. The selections have been broken down into three main categories: 1) Grown or produced using endocrine-disrupting compounds; 2) Gendered advertising and usage of coded language; and, 3) Packaging that includes endocrine-disrupting compounds.
FRANZISKA KLAAS
being ethnographic and doing ethnography; committed to feminist politics of care, thinking, writing—curious to explore the edges of knowledge production in and beyond academia; wondering about how to do academia differently
● Oslo, Norway
SUSANNE BAUER
a science and technology studies (STS) scholar; grappling with science, technology and medicine as situated practices; committed to decentering Euro-American epistemic infrastructures from within—through feminist and decolonial STS
● Oslo, Norway
How can we better understand the entanglements of endocrine disrupting substances with global economies?
ENDOCRINE DISRUPTING SUBSTANCES
How do different disciplines take stock and sort these endocrine disrupting substances in specific ways and construct along the way different visions of harm and benefit that are in flux?
How have different approaches and practices, such as biochemistry and toxicology, been shaped by and coshaped understandings of the hormonal body interlinking and engendering debates over endocrine disruptors and preconceived categories of sex/gender?
How can we historically narrate and situate different substances without retreating to stories of origin?
Endocrine disruptors range from industrial chemicals to pharmaceuticals, and from pesticides to phytoestrogens, many of them being persistent and ubiquitous pollutants. Others are attributed health benefits or just considered present in the manifold material world of biochemical processes in living matter. In their contribution, Franziska Klaas and Susanne Bauer take the variety, broadness, and ubiquity of endocrine disrupting substances in our everyday life as a point of departure to develop a preliminary and necessarily fragmentary inventory of endocrine disruptors. The goal is not only to take stock, compile, and order substances, but also to explore the limits of scientific practices and formats. Inspired by data safety sheets that normally provide information on chemicals and chemical mixtures, their potential hazards, and instructions for safe handling, they appropriate and mimic the format and develop it further for substances that circulate in everyday life. The sheets serve as a starting point and an exercise to examine the affordances, tensions, and troubles with classifications and capture-all inventories. In addition, it systematizes and standardizes the very substances that exceed data sheet formats, unfolding the categorizations in tension with what can and cannot be captured by the sheet.
Endocrine Disrupting Substances: A Partial Inventory
Late twentieth century technoscience has conceptualized the endocrine system as a complex network of different organs with hormones as messengers to control metabolism, reproduction, moods, and other bodily functions and developments. A range of synthetic chemicals as well as otherwise occurring substances produced by living beings, like plants or fungi, have a similar molecular structure and can thus act like or affect bodily produced hormones. These substances are called endocrine disruptors. They interfere with or alter endocrine processes creating effects, like an increase or decrease of hormone levels, the mimicking of endogenous hormones, or the alteration of the production of hormones. The effects of these interferences are complex, yet clearly associated with several adverse health effects and linked to environmental pollution. Their circulation and persistence have given rise to specific anthropogenic ecologies, chemical kinships, and queer survival — yet to be described.
Endocrine disruptors range from industrial chemicals to pharmaceuticals, and from pesticides to phytoestrogens. Surprised and amazed by the variety, broadness, and ubiquity of endocrine disrupting substances in our everyday life, this contribution develops a preliminary and partial inventory of endocrine disruptors. Many of them are persistent and ubiquitous pollutants, while others are attributed health benefits or considered simply present in the manifold material world of biochemical processes in living matter. Hormone mimicking has been a core conceptualization in debates over those substances: How can we situate what is being mimicked, disrupted, or reinforced, such as its enacted binaries and versions of the biomedical body? How can we historically narrate and situate different substances without retreating to stories of origin? And, how can we better understand the entanglements of these substances with global economies? How do different disciplines take stock and sort these substances in specific ways and construct along the way different visions of harm and benefit that are in flux? How have different approaches and practices, such as biochemistry and toxicology, been shaped by and co-shaped understandings of the hormonal body interlinking and engendering debates over endocrine disruptors and preconceived categories of sex/gender?
Often, scientific and popular environmental concerns based on ecotoxicology seem to focus on gender-specific concerns, such as the “feminization” of fish or the quality of sperm. At the same time, measurement and assessment devices are geared to generate metrics that capture altera-
tions of what is supposed as the norm, often conceived of as pre-gendered and assumed binary. Some of the substances we engage with — like phytoestrogens and myco-estrogens — trouble these categories, and prompt us to reconceptualize these binaries. Theorizing and working with them, just like tricksters, figures tied to mythologies and folklore, yet with futuristic potentials, as they shape-shift, deceive, mimic, and thus refute dichotomies, can push us toward plurality and heterogeneity. Seen in this way, they may help us reconceptualize epistemic infrastructures and reimagine modes of response-able coexisting with these matters.
The Pharmakon and Global Economies
The relationship between mimicry and metabolism has been a starting point for our inventory. The concept of pharmakon, in addition, allows us to highlight the deeply ambivalent and, as such, indeterminate natures of endocrine disrupting substances while emphasizing the past and present entanglements of endocrine disrupters with global economies. In the binary metaphysics of ancient Greek philosophy, the notion of pharmakon carries two incommensurable meanings: remedy and poison, as understood in pharmacology or toxicology. More recent accounts of thinking with and through the figuration of the pharmakon attempt to extend its meaning beyond toxicology and those binaries, attending to its ambiguity, instability and fluidity.
In a deconstructive reading, the pharmakon as an indeterminate simultaneity of remedy/poison proves to be prolific in dialogue with endocrine disrupting substances. Understood as non-binary configuration, it can seep into the molecular worlds of bodies in constant modification and change. Hormones and their disruptors, whether synthetically or endogenously produced, are in this sense more than just molecules. They become “bio-artifacts made of carbon chains, language, images, capital, and collective desires.”1 These substances are more than their chemical composition as they are simultaneously an integral part of global economic infrastructures. Their entanglements can be traced back another hundred years, when an increasingly globalized, militarized, capitalist world simultaneously reinforced the dependence on and the emergence of substances that we can understand as pharmakon. In the course of their existence, they have shifted, transcended, and eluded dichotomous conceptions.
1 Paul B. Preciado, Testo Junkie: Sex, Drugs, and Biopolitics in the Pharmacopornographic Era (New York: Feminist Press, 2013), 167.
Toward an Inventory
With our partial inventory, we intend not only to take stock, compile, and order, but also to test the limits of these practices and their respective scientific formats. In that sense, we are extending the invitation to examine knowledge infrastructures, materializing through safety data sheets and pertinent lists, data structures, collections of chemical substances, and compound summaries in chemistry databases.
Attending to chemistry’s classifications and taxonomies, we experiment with mimicking (in collaboration with graphic designers) individual “sheets” for a small number of substances. We chose widespread, if not ubiquitous, substances that circulate in everyday life. The sheet serves as a starting point and an exercise to examine the affordances, tensions, and troubles with classifications and capture-all inventories. In addition, it systematizes and standardizes the very substances that exceed the data sheet formats unfolding the categorizations and affordances in tension with or not captured by the sheet.
Our take can open different sensitivities, flexibilities, modifications, and disruptions that grasp these matters differently, resulting in interconnected, mixed stories of what else these substances are about. Starting from the substance itself, the sheet is a standardizing device, yet each compound brings its own transgressions and reconfiguration of the sheet.
As we intend to convey the broadness and variety of endocrine disrupting substances, we decided on the following ones:
■ DES
■ Paracetamol
■ DDT
■ PFAS
■ Testosterone
■ Soy
■ ZEA
■ BPA
This partial inventory will introduce each of these substances in terms of their elemental composition, using an expanded structural formula. These contain information on the molecular composition and structure, describing its composition and defining the compound/substance. This chemical notation contains not just the summary composition but also its molecular structure (in terms of how the elements combine and align), implying certain characteristics of the compound, for instance, with regard to solubility, binding capacity, and related metabolic pathways. We take these structural formulae as points of departure to examine the epistemic and economic entanglements each of these unruly substances.
LATENT EFFECTS
Diethylstilbestrol (DES), 4-[(E)-4-(4-hydroxyphenyl)hex-3en-3-yl]phenol (C18H20O2), also known as stilbestrol or stilboestrol, is a nonsteroidal estrogen medication, hence a synthetic substance with estrogenic effects.2 First synthesized in 1938, it was used for different estrogenic hormone therapies ranging from prevention of spontaneous abortion to postmenopausal breast cancer.3 Later, it also found an application as a growth promoter for cattle and sheep. Its prescription to pregnant women was only scrutinized in 1971, as studies showed a potential relation between in utero exposure to DES and CCA (clear-cell adenocarcinoma of the vagina, a rare form of cancer), as well as other forms of cancer. Subsequently, it was banned from being prescribed to pregnant women and, only several years later, from its use as a growth promoter in livestock.4 Although early knowledge of its effects was based on lab animals, it showed that DES is a potent estrogen that deviates from bodily-produced estrogen in its persistence in the body. It remained potent over unusually long periods, which made it difficult to understand its effects. In addition, it challenged the toxicological paradigm of “the danger is in dose,” as it appeared to be even more effective in low doses.5
DES (HIS)STORIES AND DEVIANCE
Chemical castration is a technology targeting the cis-male body. Although rarely applied anymore, it was used to treat prostate cancer. Chemical castration, however, has several other effects, such as erectile dysfunction and reduction of sexual desire. With the advent of scientific discourses linking certain hormones to aggression, it appeared to be a legitimate punishment/treatment for deviancies, intersecting biopolitics, deviant bodies, and punishment. Thus, for the first time reported in 1944, DES was applied as a chemical castration substance for sex offenders, while, for a certain period, it was also combined with aversion therapy as part of a complex treatment regime for homosexual men.6 The
Donna Haraway, “Awash in Urine: DES and Premarin® in Multispecies Response-Ability,” WSQ: Women’s Studies Quarterly 40.1 (2012): 301–16.
4
IARC Working Group on the Evaluation of Carcinogenic Risks to Pharmaceuticals, A Review of Human Carcinogens, Volume 100 (Lyon: International Agency for Research on Cancer, 2012).
5
Nancy Langston, “The Retreat from Precaution: Regulating Diethylstilbestrol (DES), Endocrine Disruptors, and Environmental Health,” Environmental History 13.1 (2008): 41–65.
6
Charles Scott, Trent Holmberg, “Castration of Sex Offenders: Prisoners’ Rights Versus Public Safety,” The Journal of the American Academy of Psychiatry and the Law 31.4 (2003): 8.
7 Basil James, “Case of Homosexuality Treated by Aversion Therapy,” The British Medical Journal 1.5280 (1962): 768–70.
effectiveness of DES as part of this so-called treatment was controversial throughout, as sexual desire appeared to increase through erectile dysfunction.7
8 Susan Bell, DES Daughters, Embodied Knowledge, and the Transformation of Women’s Health Politics in the Late Twentieth Century (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2009); Haraway, “Awash in Urine.”
9
Nicholas Neibergall, Alex Swanson, and Francisco Sánchez, “Hormones, Sexual Orientation, and Gender Identity,” in The Oxford Handbook of Evolutionary Psychology and Behavioral Endocrinology, ed. Lisa Welling and Todd Shackelford (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), 199–214; Rebecca Troisi, Julie Palmer, Elizabeth Hatch, William Strohsnitter, Dezheng Huo, Marianne Hyer, Karen Fredriksen-Goldsen, Robert Hoover, and Linda Titus, “Gender Identity and Sexual Orientation Identity in Women and Men Prenatally Exposed to Diethylstilbestrol,” Archives of Sexual Behavior 49.2 (2020): 447–54.
DES CHILDREN
With the first studies published in the 1970s that linked certain types of cancer to in utero exposure to DES, the issue gained more public awareness, which gave rise to different ways of dealing with the effects of the drug. The activism that was part of an increasing number of embodied health movements pushed further investigations and was carried forward by first- and second-generation exposed women, the latter often referred to as DES daughters. Those became vocal and active in telling their stories, challenging the pharma regime and the medicalization of the female body.8 Most active in the United States, they can also be found in other countries. However, there is another side to this alternate storytelling. DES has shifted from being part of the regime to “treat deviant bodies” to a substance under suspicion to cause “deviant desires and identities.” Often formulated as concerns around the “feminization” of bodies, the impact or rather the relation between endocrine disrupting chemicals and sex/gender is under observation, and the question between “gender disorders” or “gender dysphoria” and DES is on the table. Apart from these diagnoses being flawed, problematic, and deeply rooted in binary conceptions of sex and gender, no scientific correlation was ever established. Therefore, it remains disconcerting that this problematic line of exploration is still integral to certain disciplines and contexts.9
Glossary of Terms
The collectively written glossary of terms offers brief definitions of key terms and conceptual ideas explored in the book. Alphabetically arranged entries in this glossary are not meant to be comprehensive, authoritative definitions of the terms but seek instead to provide accessible introductions to both technical terms and philosophical ideas that are important for our research. The entries range from informative descriptions to more subjective explanations and interpretations. Our hope is that together they may serve as building blocks for further exploration and discussion of synthetic hormones, endocrine disruptors, and emerging forms of chemical kinships, queer ecologies, earthly survival, and more-than-human resistance, care, and healing.
■ ALTERLIFE
Alterlife is a figuration of chemical exposure developed by technoscience studies scholar Michelle Murphy focused on collectivities of chemicalized existence entangled with capitalism and its colonial manifestations.1 Working from colonial and capitalist pasts and presents and moving towards differently imagined futures, alterlife indexes not only life in its already altered state as a result of the chemical production of capitalism, but also life that is open to further alterations — life that has the potential to become something else. Alterlife embraces impure and contaminated forms of life, affirming their capacity to recompose and recombine within and against infrastructures of violence.
— LV
■ ANTHROPOCENE
The term Anthropocene, popularized by atmospheric chemist Paul Crutzen, originates in geology, but has gained wider currency in the social sciences, humanities, and the arts, while also capturing the popular imagination and gaining media attention — acting as shorthand for a deterioration of living conditions on Earth owing to anthropogenic activity.2 Although it now serves as a framework for coming to terms with a variety of temporally extended and vastly distributed anthropogenic disruptions, including the disruption to the diversity, biology, and ecology of living organisms, the common representations of the Anthropocene observe its original geological reference and foreground the impacts of mass extraction and consumption of fossil fuels.
— LV
1 Michelle Murphy, “Alterlife and Decolonial Chemical Relations,” Cultural Anthropology 32.4 (2017): 494–500; Michelle Murphy, “Against Population, Towards Alterlife,” in Making Kin Not Population, eds. Adele E. Clarke and Donna J. Haraway (Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press, 2018), 101–23.
2 Paul Crutzen, “Geology of Mankind,” Nature 415.23 (January 2002).
3 The Center for Genomic Gastronomy, genomicgastronomy.com; Hackteria, hackteria.org.
4 Paul B. Preciado, Testo Junkie: Sex, Drugs, and Biopolitics in the Pharmacopornographic Era (New York: Feminist Press, 2017).
■
BIO-COLONIALISM, BIO-COMMERCIALISM
Biocolonialism, intrinsically tied with bio-commercialism, is a one-way power dynamic of biological information and data being extracted from disenfranchised, disempowered peoples or communities or groups for the benefit of the people doing the extraction or the people that hold the power in that relationship. This could be, for example, scientists entering Indigenous communities and taking biological data and information for their own scientific purposes. It could be for-profit companies entering into disenfranchised communities or groups and seeing data for their own commercial profit and benefit. But generally, it’s a description of the oneway extraction of data and biological information to support the colonizers in whatever power imbalance.
— KT
■ BIOHACKING
Biohacking refers to performance of non-institutional science with origins from the DIY and computer hacking movement. While there are several sub-genres of biohacking that point to modern uses of technology (e.g., transhumanism, quantified self, etc.), this book emphasizes the democratizing and collectivizing potential of biohacking and recognizes that there is nothing inherently futuristic nor utopian about the practice. To quote from the Center for Genomic Gastronomy and the global Hackteria network, “We have always been biohackers.”3
— MM
■ BIOPOLITICS
Biopolitics refers to the intersection of economic, political, and cultural influence over the bodily autonomy of human and non-human species.
— BR
■ BIOPOWER
Biopower is a term coined by French philosopher Michel Foucault to describe the techniques for the subjugation of individuals and the control of populations adopted by modern nation states. Returning to Foucault’s analysis, transfeminist theorist Paul B. Preciado points out how disciplinary management of bodies persists but its logic is now discrete, privatized, individualized, and — with the administration of population through pharmacological control — also diffuse and molecular.4 With the new technologies of pharmacological self-management and self-surveillance, such as hormonal surveillance through menstrual apps designed to self-regulate cycles and ovulation, bodies are disciplined and
their biodata exploited for profit by companies that collect, own, and extract value out of them.
— MF, ZR
■ BIRTH CONTROL PILL, CONTRACEPTIVE PILL, THE PILL
A hormonal contraceptive method that consists in the daily ingestion of a pill containing a varying mix of estrogens and progestins, which prevents pregnancy by inhibiting ovulation. “The Pill” was developed in the United States in the 1950s, first tested in animals and then in Puerto Rican women, mirroring colonial relations between the two countries, and then quickly adopted by millions of women in the Western, industrialized world.5 Although short-term contraceptive methods, such as the birth control pill or condoms, come only second to long-term contraceptives such as intra-uterine devices (IUDs) and female sterilization worldwide, there is no other method used in as many countries as the birth control pill. Its use, however, concentrates in Africa and Europe, being the main contraceptive method in many European countries.6 The birth control pill has a fascinating and versatile history. In the 1960s and 1970s, it was mobilized by feminist movements around the world for the advancement of women’s right to decide if and when to bear children.7 The Pill has also, at different and numerous times, been criticized for asymmetrically placing the burden of contraceptive work and side effects, that reportedly range from weight gain to cancer, solely on women and people with ovaries. More recently, the synthetic hormones contained in the contraceptive pill have been associated with concerns with environmental pollution and endocrine disruption.
— MRS
■ BISPHENOL A (BPA)
A synthetic plasticizer used in the production of plastics and epoxy resins that make up the inner coatings to metallic food cans. BPA is a confirmed endocrine disruptor and one of the most widespread hormone-mimicking substances. Especially when heated, BPA can leach from plastic containers into food.
— SB, FK
■ BODIES OF WATER
To conceptualize our bodies as watery beings, as hydrofeminist Astrida Neimanis proposes, is to acknowledge that our existence is situated in myriad relations with other human, nonhuman, and more-than-human bodies.8 For Neimanis, water — more than any other element — entangles human
5 Nelly Oudshoorn, Beyond the Natural Body: An Archaeology of Sex Hormones (London: Routledge, 1994).
6 “Trends in Contraceptive Use Worldwide,” Economic & Social Affairs (New York: United Nations, 2015).
7 Bibia Pavard, Si je veux, quand je veux: Contraception et avortement dans la société française (Rennes: PU Rennes, 2012).
9 Angeliki Balayannis and Emma Garnett, “Chemical Kinship: Interdisciplinary Experiments with Pollution,” Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience 6.1 (Spring 2020): 1–10.
bodies with more-than-human worlds. As two-thirds of the human body are composed of water, we come to be and live in watery milieus: in many ways, we are water, and we depend on water for our survival. Examining the philosophical and ethical implications of where our water comes from, where it goes, and what happens to it along the way is key to hydrofeminism — a posthuman feminist phenomenology (and ethics) developed by Neimanis. Hydrofeminism considers the stakes of the intense interdependency of bodily and planetary waters, investigating what it means to be connected, indebted, and accountable to other planetary bodies of water with which we come into contact.
— LV
■ CHEMICAL ANTHROPOCENE
The Chemical Anthropocene designates an epoch in which every corner of the planet and every part of the body are exposed to, and affected by, industrially manufactured chemicals. It marks an era of absolute and permanent exposure where nothing is safe or pure, and the only way forward is with and despite toxic anthropogenic chemicals. The Chemical Anthropocene thus calls for effective forms of resistance, not merely by demanding the accountable production, use, and disposal of chemicals, but also by cultivating forms of resilience and care attuned to the experience and needs of a life already altered by exposure to man-made chemicals.
— LV
■ CHEMICAL
KINSHIP
With the notion of chemical kinship, interdisciplinary scholars Angeliki Balayannis and Emma Garnett probe what finding good kinship with “bad” chemicals might involve.9 Building on decolonial feminist research on chemicals, Balayannis and Garnett encourage collaborative, interdisciplinary, and inventive ways of attending to environmental chemicals that are never entirely “good” nor “bad” — being, to some extent, always both enabling and harmful. Rather than investing in purity politics, the concept of chemical kinship invites an expansive, open-minded approach to researching chemicals and learning to live well with them, extending the relationships of care and responsibility to potentially harmful and hazardous material entities.
— LV
■ CHEMICAL
REGULATION
National and international legislative frameworks for regulating chemicals aim to ensure high levels of protection for human health and the environment. Such frameworks are
Unconclusion
In the book, we have articulated research concerns pertaining to the effects of industrial, pharmaceutical, and morethan-human production and the interplay of hormonally active molecules, raising several key questions, including: What does life re-assembled by hormonally active substances look and feel like? Who are we becoming with them? How can we live well with them despite their potential for harm? Rather than providing straightforward answers, we have mapped out the complex nature of these questions and problematized the assumptions that lead us too quickly to easy answers.
Therefore, there is no conclusion or closure — the investigations continue. We leave the lines of inquiry open and encourage you, dear reader, to keep looking for answers with an open mind. Open to what synthetic hormones and endocrine disrupting compounds are and what living a good life with them might entail. And, open to not only new ideas, but also feelings, sensations, and desires that might emerge in the process. After all, if answers are to be found, they will be disclosed not in the world out there, but within these synthetic bodies we are becoming; these bodies — and the answers within them — being a perpetually shifting horizon.
Synthetic Becoming
Malin Ah-King and Eva Hayward; Aliens in Green (Léonore Bonaccini, Ewen Chardronnet, Xavier Fourt, Špela Petrič, Mary Maggic); Adham Faramawy; Feminist Technoscience Governance Collaboratory (Jacquelyne Luce with Vrisha Ahmad, April Albrecht, Sarah Hyde, Amanda Kearney, Lainie LaRonde, Alek Meyer, Cassie Pawlikowski, Karisa Poedjirahardjo, Emily Pollack, Anjali RaoHerel, and Ella Sevier); Annabel Guérédrat, Rian Ciela Hammond and Krystal Tsosie; Franziska Klaas and Susanne Bauer; Marne Lucas; Mary Maggic; OBOT (Maddalena Fragnito and Zoe Romano); Byron Rich; Mariana Rios Sandoval and the Rosæ Canine Collective (Bethsabée ElhararLemberg, Maïwenn Le Roux, Elena Souvannavong); Lenka Veselá; and, Ker Wallwork
Editor Lenka Veselá
Consulting Editor Etienne Turpin
Editorial Assistant Faye Campbell
Graphic Design Day Shift Office (Bára Růžičková & Terezie Štindlová)
Printing & Binding HRG Litomyšl
Co-published by
K. Verlag Herzbergstr. 40–43 D-10365 Berlin info@k-verlag.org k-verlag.org
ISBN 978-3-947858-37-8 &
Brno University of Technology Faculty of Fine Arts Údolní 244/53 602 00 Brno Czech Republic favu.vut.cz
The content of this publication underwent a blind peer-review process.
The essay “Toxic Sexes: Perverting Pollution and Queering Hormone Disruption” was first published in 2013 with open access in O-zone: A Journal of Object-Oriented Studies and was republished online in Technosphere Magazine in 2019. It is reprinted here with the permission of its authors, Malin Ah-King and Eva Hayward.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any other information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers.
Every effort has been made to find copyright holders. The publishers apologize for any errors or omissions and would be grateful to be notified of any corrections that should appear in any reprint.
